Word: snobbism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...accent into every home, caste-conscious Britain was still confronted by an unexpected phenomenon of the welfare state: equality of opportunity had eased the economic tensions in Marx-proclaimed "class conflict," but it had led to a sharp increase in what the sociologists call "status conflict"-in other words, snobbism...
Each country came by the craze in its own way. In Paris, Jacques de Saint-Phalle, whose respectable business has been the manufacture of plastic tubes for hospitals and laboratories, decided to hop aboard the bandwagon-but on "a snobbism level." In France, he reasoned, the quickest way to get a fad started was to set the intellectuals to doing it. First intellectual to have her picture snapped inside a hoop: Franchise (Bonjour Tristesse) Sagan. With shapely entertainers getting into the act, Saint-Phalle had another fear: that the church might find the hula movement erotic and condemn...
...when page after page of unselective trivia has been set down, the reader finds himself aching for an earplug. O'Hara continues to describe the nuances of social habit with rare authority in a society in which social flux continuously alters the symbols of prestige. But the snobbism of the right prep school, the right club, the right street in the right exurb becomes so intrusive that Terrace often reads like a gigantic menu...
...when the critical caddie shortage is solved by establishing the Caddies' Revolving Incentive Fund. And the rapacious golf pro, who year after year keeps promising his customers that their game will improve, is in a sense the guardian of the American dream. At Happy Knoll, a bit of snobbism is not only the opium of the Mrs. but the Miltown of both sexes ("How many Cadillacs are there at Hard Hollow? Two. How many at Happy Knoll? Eight on a summer's weekday and often twenty of a Saturday...
...wild flirting. Once he showed her carried away by witches and looking as cool as ever. When she died, he turned from palace to street life, found it every bit as weird. He was the first social commentator in art to recognize and dispense with the unconscious snobbism of picturesque effects...