Word: plebeian
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Tammy Grimes's Cyrenne is a perkily perfect farceuse, a bedroom imp continually assuming antic positions with dry-witted composure. Edward Woodward's Percy is a plebeian prince of pathos. Under his toothbrush mustache lurks a toothy nervous tic of a grin with which he commits endless facial suicides of self-doubt. He is as simple as the wooden rattle (a soccer-game noisemaker) that he carries in his hand. A mere kiss from Cyrenne makes him act like a porpoise with convulsions...
Misleading & Disrespectful. In the two years that the Earl of Arran has been writing for the tabloid News, his plebeian readers have discovered in him that favorite British combination-lordly eccentricity. Few subjects are too large, and none too small, to embroil the Earl. He cannot fathom the Common Market, but he can try: "The lady from Bexhill still bangs away at me about a mass importation of French courtesans. But I think there must be more to the Common Mar ket than that." "Electrified" by reading in a Sunday women's page that a daub of lipstick artfully...
...whose son became Sir Bernard in time for the 17th edition), the book is a kind of Who Was Who that lists more than 150,000 names, and traces each lordly family back to its earliest noble ancestor, thus clearly differentiating survivors of the old, landowning aristocracy from the plebeian parvenus whose titles, created in the past half-century, now represent more than 50% of the peerage...
...published in the U.S., the book proves itself more than a kind of private school Peyton Place. Benedictus' obviously partisan aim is to indict the Eton system for destroying a poor boy named Scarfe because, as a plebeian farmer's son brought to the school in a "democratic" experiment, he cannot conform to it socially, and for corrupting a rich boy named Phillips by giving him no socially acceptable choice except conformity...
...machine was dutifully teaching the new generation how to put up Greek temples and Renaissance palazzi. But beyond the walls of the Beaux Arts, a few men were stirring restively. Among them was a gifted builder named Auguste Ferret, who was the first to prove convincingly how effective the plebeian material of reinforced concrete could be. Another was Architect Peter Behrens of Berlin, whose glass-and-steel industrial buildings were pioneers. Jeanneret worked for both. He found Ferret's reinforced concrete studio in Paris, with its glassed front wall, "a manifesto" in itself, and harked to Ferret...