Word: parvenues
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Then the doors opened, and the dripping masses poured in. Divide and conquer was the rule. The women stormed the stairs to the Marimekko dresses. The patient wicker stool-sitter triumphantly claimed a $969 sofa, reduced to $700. He had a brief scuffle with a parvenu female customer who arrived at 9, but she quickly yielded before such obviously superior expertise...
Giving money turned out to be less rewarding than making it. People talked about the guilt complex that drove Nuffield; the Establishment, for which he had no use anyhow, scorned him as a parvenu. Angrily, he hired a genealogist, who traced his family to Oxfordshire gentry of 1278, a date few noble lords hark back to. Then W.R.M., as friends called him, retired deeper into the shade and kept six secretaries busy sorting the 2,000 requests for funds he received weekly. Toward the end, Nuffield began to complain that "they like me for my money instead of myself," sometimes...
...round eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, I saw the extinct race of ancient Rome, which had marched intrepidly over the whole expanse of the ancient world and conquered it." He admits his isolation from the mainstream of European life: "The most worthless German parvenu was closer and more understandable to me than an educated foreigner...
...parvenu playing a game that calls for expertise, Publisher Morrison made many costly mistakes. The Journal's vaunted liberalism was never more than timid; its qualifications as a newspaper were never better than just fair. Toward the end, the paper was losing $90,000 a month, and the till was so bare that Morrison borrowed money from his own loyal staffers-many of whom have not been paid since mid-December...
...fact that Britons, unlike Americans, are created unequal is a source of fascination to British Journalist Ron Hall. 27, a Cambridge-educated bricklayer's son with an encyclopedic knowledge of what is U, non-U, and parvenU. Two years ago, he formulated Hall's Law, which states that "the higher a person's social position, the more names he's likely to have (e.g., Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunketty-Earnle-Earle-Drax)." Delving further into the small print of Debrett's Peerage, Hall emerged with another proposition, published last week with a statistical breakdown...