Word: mayfairisms
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...truce to this Anglo-American bickering, and a plague on those who foment it ... I have this to say to la Phillips of Hove [TIME, Feb. 23]: "Cockney" (and I'm a born Londoner) is an unpleasant whine, "Lancashire" murders the Queen's English and "Mayfair" is definitely, but definitely, effete...
...Does TIME mean then that the speaker was an old man with a quavery voice? Or were you referring to the mode of expression and pronunciation? If this last is the case, then I venture to say that the British accent, be it Scots, Lancashire, Cockney or merely Mayfair, has more vitality, variety and general caress to the ear than the flat, nasal monotone that passes for speech...
Less honored denizens of Mayfair soon found characteristic ways of expressing their ill-concealed envy at the American's rocketlike rise in their rarefied atmosphere. At the bar in White's, the most exclusive club in London, it became the churlish fashion to describe a badly mixed cocktail by saying: "It tastes as if Douglas had been polishing at least half his medals in it." Not long ago, Fairbanks in impeccable white tie & tails strode into White's with a full complement of medals and orders gleaming on his chest. An effete British voice broke the hushed...
...Light for the Queen. Feline Mayfair smacked its lips in anticipation of revenge at last when it heard that Doug was trying to persuade his old Mediterranean Theater crony Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, to bring his wife round to The Boltons for "a jolly time." Surely, not even Fairbanks could bring that off. But last November the Queen accepted. The Fairbankses were in a state of jitters all day before the dinner. It was not eased when an unidentified voice, possibly a hoaxter, called to say that the power company was going to have to shut off their electricity that...
...news of her visit got into the Times's social calendar next day. Since the Times seldom makes such an announcement unless the news is received from the persons directly concerned, society was in an uproar. But the Fairbankses had at least the satisfaction of knowing that Mayfair's indignation was mixed with a good measure of pure envy...