Word: parvenu
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Houghton Library opened, three months after Pearl Harbor, it was described as "fireproof, earthquake-proof, and reasonably protected against the incendiary bomb." The fire inspector looked the place over and classified it in the same category as a bank vault. And now, the staff at its parvenu neighbor Lamont, (which the Houghton people refer to as "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), call it the "Jewel Box." For, besides being the University's most sumptuous bookshelf, Houghton acts as show case and safe deposit vault for one of the world's finest collections of rare books and documents...
...fact is that Church scholars have given scant attention to parvenu Freud and extremely few Catholics have ever been analyzed. People who manifestly are unaware of the true nature of either psychoanalysis or confession have often facilely claimed that Catholics have confession, therefore do not need psychoanalysis. On the other hand, it is also curious to note the term 'absolution' appearing more and more frequently in psychoanalytic literature. . . . Whatever their similarities and differences, it is high time that Catholics and Freudians got together and swapped some of their trade secrets...
...battle of the ports was being fought with fresh vigor. Cartagena, 414 years old and long a sleeper behind ancient, 50-foot-thick walls, had roused itself and gone after business. Its parvenu competitors: Barranquilla and Buenaventura. Stake: the trade between Colombia's rich, highland interior and lands across...
...operetta-goers, the word for the Balkans had been "romantic'': in Marsovia, the Merry Widow's imaginary country, the people waltzed in boots and dainty slippers, drank plum brandy and intrigued their way through ballrooms and bedrooms. To diplomats, the word had been "obscure": ephemeral dynasties, parvenu politicians and illiterate courtesans played at running governments. To newspaper readers, the word was "confusing": barely pronounceable, barely distinguishable lands constantly seemed to be staging wars, revolutions and political assassinations for reasons too involved for correspondents to explain...
...time. To Bernanos, France remains at heart a Christian and human patrie of which he believes 18th-Century economic nationalism made nothing but a caricature. The bourgeoisie that inherited France in the French Revolution never, he thinks, fooled the French people. "It found itself in the position of a parvenu who, after acquiring a historic estate, wonders how to make himself respected...