Word: pinchbeck
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Dates: during 1875-1875
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...paint corrodes and spoils the bourgeois beneath. No bourgeois needs to be told that he is as good as the next man and a good deal better, and though as poeta nascitur, etc., a man can't make himself a gentleman, he can become the pinchbeck imitation thereof, and if he cannot attract notice in one way he can in another. No one would bear any ill-will to a man who snorted in chapel through ignorance, but if he continued to disgust a crowd of men because he thought it funny, he would be in a very different position...