Word: parvenues
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There was good reason for concern. The small rural landowner was being squeezed dry. More and more parvenu nobles, exempt from taxes, were buying country property; the mounting costs of a burgeoning bureaucracy thus fell on fewer and fewer Frenchmen. Petitions for nobles and clergy to share in the tax load went unheard...
...other, more overbearing moments one wishes he had taken to heart a line in the play, when the student Trofimov advises the exuberant parvenu Lopakhin: "Stop waving your arms about. Get out of the habit of making grand gestures...
...problem, never a comic strip. Gossip was minimal, scandal sanitized-in keeping with the prim slogan, "All the news that's fit to print." The paper seemed edited for someone with a meticulous interest in the rise and fall of Cabinets in obscure countries. TIME, in its own parvenu days in the shadow of the august Times, used to refer to it saucily, with a mixture of admiration and exasperation, as "the good grey Times...
...postbellum parvenu, forged on steelmaking and railroads rather than magnolias and gentility, Birmingham dug in against the black demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. Bull Connor, who really ran the city as public safety commissioner, personified entrenched white supremacy. In Birmingham's embattled spring of 1963, Connor coldly ordered his police and firemen to cut off black marches on downtown with fire hoses, police dogs and clubs. A series of bombings culminated one September morning in a blast that ripped open a black church, killing four small girls in Sunday-school class learning "the love that forgives...
...moody music (as in jazz) and white racism (as in honky). The U.S. was the first nation to put stars on its national flag, and some vexillologists (flag experts) agree with Political Scientist Whitney Smith that the flag should display the familiar circle of 13 stars, leaving out every parvenu state created or attached from...