Word: snobbishness
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Hamilton's Itinerarium is one of the most candid and engaging travel diaries to come down from a colonial American. It is casual to the point of slightness, a bit snobbish and of little historical importance. But it brings the speech of the time and the look of town & country to the reader in a way historians rarely do. Hamilton was contemptuous .of "aggrandized upstarts" who put on social airs, and he frankly looked down on anyone who was not a "gentleman." He loved good company, drank with relish but not to excess (the capacity of New York City...
...Young and Fair has a real sense of how thorny and bewildering life can be: an endless emotional seesaw, a constant moral crossroads. It understands, too, how snobbish institutions like Brook Valley help strangle decent impulses. Unfortunately it has not let bad enough alone, but has gone at ticklish human problems with the red hot pincers of melodrama, and has so loaded itself down with wiles and theatrics that it finally caves in. There is so much plot that there is no real plight; the words, like the deeds, smack at times of garish melodrama...
June Bride (Warner). Thanks largely to some bright dialogue and an artful performance by Robert Montgomery, this is the best Bette Davis picture in some time. Relaxing from her usual heavy dramatics in a light comedy, Bette is cast as the snobbish, know-it-all editor of a woman's magazine...
...play tells of three glaringly dissimilar couples who decide to share a Manhattan mansion. One couple is incredibly frivolous and snobbish; another is grubby, worthy and naive; both are caricatures, while the third is merely colorless. Never deviating from formula, Town House first shows the couples squabbling with one another, then shows them squabbling among themselves, introduces a snooty mother, a sassy child, and a big shot neighbor who first wishes them all in hell and finally carries them all to heaven...
...Catholics and not Red Cross, Veronica didn't get it; she had always "thought it best to be a Catholic." As she grew up, she discovered that a great house on Long Island and another on Fifth Avenue couldn't protect her from social wounds inflicted by snobbish non-Catholics. She picked up other facts of life: "shanty" Irish didn't rate with her own "lace-curtain" set; German Jews thought that marriage to a Russian Jew was a comedown...