Word: snob
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...Buckley luxuriates in his amenities a bit too much, and one hears in his prose the happy sigh of a man sinking into a hot bath. So his enemies try to dismiss him as Marie Antoinette in a pimpmobile. They portray him as, among other things, a terrible, terminal snob...
...make the accusation is to misunderstand both William F. Buckley Jr. and the nature of snobbery. Buckley is an expansive character who is almost indiscriminately democratic in the range of his friends and interests. He glows with intimidating self-assurance. The true snob sometimes has an air of pugnacious, overbearing self-satisfaction, but it is usually mere front. The snob is frequently a grand porch with no mansion attached, a Potemkin affair. The essence of snobbery is not real self-assurance but its opposite, a deep apprehension that the jungles of vulgarity are too close, that they will creep...
...probably more difficult to be a snob now than it once was. The logistical base is gone. If Buckley were one, he would have to be considered one of the last of the great Renaissance snobs, a generalist capable of insufferable expertise on everything from Spanish wines to spinnakers. But the making of such a handsomely knowledgeable, or even pseudo-knowledgeable, character requires family money and leisure of a kind not often available in the late 20th century. "A child's education," Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, "should begin at least one hundred years before he was born...
Skillman added that Chafin was "down to earth" and "easy-to-talk-to" in contrast to Gorski, whom he described as a "snob...
...gracious impulses. Commentators from Coleridge to Shaw have praised Helena and the Countess as among the "loveliest" and "most charming" of Shakespeare's heroines, while dismissing Bertram and Parolles as unworthy of the ladies' or our interest. By Act V, Helena's passion for her unrequiting snob has become an act of beatific willfulness and the stuff of gaslight melodrama...