Word: snobs
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...MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective...
...Oxford,* "snob" is not just another four-letter word but a way of being. Class, according to the despairing cry of Poet John Betjeman, is the primary English passion, one that has survived the welfare state and the shrunken horizons of em pire. The subject, class, and the scene, Oxford, form the substance of this depressing but enlightening fictional report on what might be called the Cold War Generation...
...home on the subway. Right behind them are the club owners themselves, notably John Perona of El Morocco, a proud, tough member of the 8,000,000, whose daytime chalk-stripe suits shine like awnings in the sun, and the Stork's Sherman Billingsley, who, like any nightclub snob, is forever practicing the difficult feat of looking down while looking...
...suburb of New York's Westchester County, where the only certainties are debt and taxes. Peaceable Lane is a newly planted colony of middle-class status creepers whose houses cost $30,000. "You can get some pretty odd ones at those prices," says a big-rich snob from nearby Grassy Tor, but Peaceable Lane's eleven families, ranging from doctors and lawyers to a union vice president and a radio commentator, are not notably odd. Matt and his neighbors are a standoffish, power-mower elite who rarely pool anything beyond the cars with which the wives chauffeur...
...Snobs & Anti-Snobs. Religion is disposed of in half a page (largely because of the "dominant English contentment with half-knowledge"), but snobbery gets, naturally, twice the space: "It is a poor thing indeed, but we have made it all our own." Postwar prosperity has done some damage to the barriers of class: "The extremes of English society are still inalienably English, but much in the middle is half American." Most of the population "is constantly engaged in trying to talk more grandly than its parents did ... It is painful to experience. It is like trying to force a left...