Word: parvenues
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Webster's Third New International Dictionary has now replaced the venerable second edition (1934) in all bookstores. Hopefully, much more time will elapse before this skimpy lexical parvenu pushes its immediate ancestor out of reference rooms and private libraries...
President, chief stockholder and supersalesman of Revlon, Inc. is Charles Haskell Revson, 53, the prodigal parvenu of the perfume-and-lipstick trade, whose reputation for omniscience about milady's taste is matched only by his legendary omnivorousness toward his own executives (TIME, Nov. 16). Last week a former Revlon vice president sued Charles Revson for $601,460 damages on charges of breach of agreement in a stock transaction made when the plaintiff left Revlon two years ago. The plaintiff: Martin Elliot Revson, Charlie's younger (49) brother...
...stinging fable tells of a blithe young actress who marries an aging, swashbuckling wartime hero, then finds herself brutally snubbed by the petted women of Yugoslavia's bureaucratic clique. In violently purple prose, Djilas lashes at this "sham aristocracy" which, "when not loafing about in their magnificent parvenu offices, moved from place to place, lived in their own select and restricted summer resorts, gathered in their own exclusive theaters and stadium boxes." The point of Djilas' attack is not privilege itself, but privilege in the hands of those who had betrayed the revolution, who fed the country...
Braine's novel, in fact, presents a startling parallel to The Red and the Black. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal's masterpiece, Hero Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) is a handsome young parvenu of considerable practical intelligence. Rising 25, he sits at his desk in the town hall and dreams the usual "clerk's dream" of sports "cars, town houses, Riviera villas, linen sheets-and women who look right in them. "I'm going to have the lot," he announces grimly one day, and, like Sorel, he sets his cap for the daughter (Heather Sears...
...Cabinet of the Fifth Republic sat in dutiful silence at the foot of his dais, De Gaulle announced that he himself would speak for France at the prospective summit meeting-though, naturally, "with Premier Michel Debré at my side." With the disdain of a prince for a parvenu, he shot a derisive shaft at Khrushchev, "whom I met not so very long ago in Moscow in Stalin's entourage and who has come some distance since...