Word: raffish
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Indeed, by night or day, the island's fun-and-games fulcrum is Lahaina (pronounced La-high-nah), a one-street, six-block town with the raffish aura of Virginia City cum Tijuana. Once the playground of Hawaiian royalty, and later in the 19th century a major port for whaling ships and China clippers, the clapboard community has been restored to a state of authentic tackiness. La haina boasts some 30 restaurants and about 260 stores whose offerings range from elegant scrimshaw and touristy puka-shell necklaces to T shirts with slogans like DON'T HASSLE THE HUMPBACKS...
...result was a collection that was a pure demonstration of its owner's fantasies. The clothes peddler's son from Grand Street was, at heart, a displaced Edwardian grandee, longing for the class (high, slightly raffish, demanding and Anglophile) into which he had not been born. His conversation had the pungency of a vanished era; it demanded, and got, a great deal of time and attention. It coiled and ran and turned back on itself, wandering off into apparent non sequiturs to test the listener, piling metaphor on private joke, allusion on trope, and then puncturing the entire...
Their firms, long considered upstart midtown outfits, were located in anonymous high-rise office buildings a $6 cab ride from the tonier downtown Wall Street firms. These firms disdained takeover work because of its past association with hungry and raffish conglomerateurs...
Elaine's, as even people in Peoria know, is that raffish gin mill on Manhattan's Upper East Side where the sleeker elements of publishing and broadcasting gather to eat roadhouse food and trade gossip. Over the years, journalists have grown into Hollywood-gauge celebrities, and Elaine's has now become so chic, so select, so humid with status and power, that some people would kill for a good table...
...modeled on the real-life exploits of Rosa Lewis (1867-1952), a legendary Londoner who started her career as a Cockney skivvy, became for a time a mistress to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), and wound up as the proprietor of the Cavendish Hotel, a slightly raffish establishment catering to the upper crust. Successes like Rosa's require bullheadedness and a certain animal cunning, qualities that Actress Gemma Jones mimes impressively. Her Louisa is a furious wren, an unbreakable China doll with a chin shaped like an eggshell and hard as a rock. "I just wanna...