Word: parvenues
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...each other in factories and institutes. They skirmish with catapults, battering rams and sometimes submachine guns, until a despairing Mao asks, "Who could have foreseen this kind of fighting?" and prepares to let the army restore order. Even then, as the authors indicate, irony is not played out. Parvenu ultraleftists are branded "counterrevolutionary," and the rightists are restored to power...
...Donleavy's world, things must never be "ersatz" or "outre," nor people "parvenu"; chamois gloves and cummerbunds are "de rigeur." A favorite social disease is known fondly as "The Syph". All is familiar and in its place, for good or for worse. You are meant to enter his world of social fatuousness, accept his intimate chit-chat as personal conseil and assume that you possess all the sports cars, villas and yachts that are referred to. As a result, you and your mythical antagonist--i.e., the ever-present social enemy--become the protagonists. The verbal bouts in which you both...
WELL INTO TOTS IN TINSELTOWN the pariah-to-parvenu actors and actresses--the tots in Hollywood--sit around a barren movie set, pink slips in their hands, pondering their impending return to poverty. Kitty Kaboodle, dancing wonder, naif from Moot Point, Montana, says she'll go home, give up the glamour. But Henna Hoofer, jaded and street-smart, tries to change Kitty's mind; she tells her she's got to keep on, then looks up into the lights in a mood of inspiration invoking the dream of the silver screen: "Everywhere," she says, "there are girls...
...writes: "Today would be Hitler's birthday. How many birthdays I spent with Hitler in the Berlin chancellery, with delegations paying homage to him, with grandiose parades!" He recalls his mother's observation of evenings spent at a mountain castle: "Hitler was terribly nice. But such a parvenu world!" He broods on the fact that he suddenly cannot remember the Führer's "engaging traits": "Have continued to reflect on my relationship to Hitler. The theme of faithlessness." He recalls the remark of an associate, "made after an evening visit to my studio, that...
...There's also a element of class barriers, although neither Frederick Forsythe Winterbourne (Barry Brown) nor Annie P. Miller, alias Daisy (Cybill Shepherd) have money problems. Winterbourne has all of the necessary graces to succeed in the elite American circles of Europe while Daisy, a mixture of pariah and parvenu, doesn't even know enough to hold her teacup with her pinky extended. The real tension arises when she rejects his stiff pleas for conformity and rebels against the double-standard demands of his social circles. Daisy goes out with strange men late into the night; she burns and glows...