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Word: riffraff (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...close, that they will creep up and reclaim the soul and drag it back down into its native squalor, back to the Velveeta and the doubleknits. So the breed dresses for dinner and crooks pinkies and drinks Perrier with lime and practices sneering at all the encroaching riffraff that are really its own terrors of inadequacy. Snobbery is a grasping after little dignities, little validations and reassurances. It is a way of swanking up the self, of giving it some swag and flounce and ormolu. It is a way of asserting what one is not (not like them), what...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Essay: A Good Snob Nowadays Is Hard to Find | 9/19/1983 | See Source »

...onion fraud partly on the Carter Administration: "It started in 1977 when we Georgians descended on Washington and were overheard whispering at embassy receptions, state dinners and Cabinet meetings about suppliers, shipments and prospects for the year's crop. This attracted the attention of gossip columnists and other riffraff. Soon Vidalias were appearing on the shelves of the Georgetown Safeway, the supermarket of the elite where you're embarrassed to shop if you're not wearing tennis togs or jodhpurs, depending on the season...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: In Georgia: Onion, Onion Is All the Word | 7/25/1983 | See Source »

...their livestock and waited to plant their spring wheat, temperatures fell to 18° below zero, and the steady icy winds were a bone-numbing 15 m.p.h. Cracked U.S. Congressman Mark Andrews, who is a North Dakota farmer: "Up here we say that 40 below zero keeps the riffraff...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Nation: The Plains of Plenty | 1/21/1980 | See Source »

Genuine Scrap. Josiah Bounderby (Timothy West) is the apostle of the creed, the poor boy who made good, a man of red-faced bluster and aggressive self-pity. "I'm a bit of dirty riffraff," he brags, "a genuine scrap of rag, tag and bobtail." His young wife Louisa Gradgrind (Jacqueline Tong, who played Daisy in Upstairs, Downstairs] is as much a victim of the times as her husband's workers. Her father (Patrick Allen), who runs what is thought to be a progressive school, has taught her to ignore all feeling and rely only on facts...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: VIEWPOINT: And Now, Here's Charles Dickens | 5/16/1977 | See Source »

...youngsters had left. The same heavy snow leveled a horse barn in Windham, Me., but four horses trapped under the snow and twisted metal were dug out alive. Sturdy North Dakotans of Scandinavian descent, long since inured to cold, broke out booster buttons proclaiming: MINUS 40 BELOW KEEPS THE RIFFRAFF OUT. When West Virginia's Governor Jay Rockefeller insisted on being inaugurated outdoors in Charleston's 0° weather, local wags quipped, "We always figured it would be a cold day in hell when a New Yorker would become Governor here." The situation was hardly funny, however...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: WEATHER: The Big Freeze | 1/31/1977 | See Source »

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