Word: debrett
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Every modern girl needs a little help to get through life's thorny predicaments. And those predicaments routinely include one-night stands and going topless on the beach--at least according to British publisher Debrett's, which since 1769 has been recording aristocratic genealogies and setting forth the rules of proper behavior. The new book Debrett's Etiquette for Girls dictates how to dress on a first date ("All men will weaken at a bit of slinkiness"), how best to gossip (Rule No. 1: "Watch your back"), and what to do when encountering celebrities ("Exploit their insecurities, butter them...
...Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage, the studbook of the British aristocracy, has decided to join the 20th century. Explaining that "about one in every four children in Britain is born out of wedlock," Debrett's co-editor Charles Kidd pointed out that the 2,300-page 169th edition of the tome, published last week at $205 a copy, for the first time includes the "illegitimate issue" of the titled and blue-blooded. According to Kidd, the change was requested by many people previously excluded. Said he: "Since Debrett's has everything to do with being a book of record...
...uninitiated, that the British can easily afford to maintain them. Some mildew and burst upholstery would lend poignancy to the subliminal cry for help. In any case, a collection is not a house, and the catchpenny title "Treasure Houses"-- suggesting Palladian Fort Knoxes inhabited by Volpones from Debrett's--does not convey the agreeably worn mixture of the grand and the scruffy that often defines their charm. The show embraces conventions of glamour (mainly about Georgian England) that few social historians would accept today. It rehearses the conventional picture of enlightened Augustan Whigs, adored by the whole inferior creation from...
...case of the first volume, Debrett's Texas Peerage (Coward-McCann; $24.95), this means pretty much the landed and oiled gentry; there are more than 100 families in this category in Texas with a net worth of $30 million or more each. Debrett's aristocrats are selected by Georgia Author Hugh Best (Red Hot & Blue). The largest landholders of this pride of peers, the King-Kleberg clan, at one point owned 13 million acres around the world, though, as Nelson Bunker Hunt observed, "a billion dollars isn't what it used to be." Among other renowned Texas...
After Texas, to be published in November, will come Debrett's Old South Peerage in spring 1985 and its California Peerage that fall. New York gets its treatment in 1986, to be followed the next year by a volume for Boston and most of the New England area. The entire series is to be completed in 1990, by which time the ranks of American "patricianhood'' (Stansfeld's term) will doubtless have expanded to fit legions of new peers. Judging from the Texas volume", many of those elevated have ancestors of no greater moral ignobility than most...