Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...attractive crossroads, contemplating his fate somewhere in Bridgehampton, Long Island, a summer sporting grounds for New York City's diverse meritocracy. Schmidt's own credentials are hard-earned: a sheepskin from Harvard and a partnership at a leading Manhattan law firm. He also belongs to a high caste: the Wasp establishment that first built the shingled 14-room "cottages" and exclusive country clubs of the Hamptons...
DIED. E. DIGBY BALTZELL, 80, sociologist who, in his studies of American Protestantism, popularized the acronym wasp for his fellow white Anglo-Saxon Protestants; in Boston...
...spin out a whiny and exceedingly slow-moving melodrama of Lily White's fretful childhood and early adult years. Her younger sister, we learn at great length, was pretty and petulant and absorbed all their parents' attention; her father was a Jewish businessman who tried unsuccessfully to be a Wasp; the husband Lily eventually married was handsome but shallow...
...friends had never seen him look so sad. In his graceful exit speech, they heard all the qualities and contradictions that have made Powell's character and career so fascinating: a military man with a social conscience; a black New Yorker who attracted white Southern voters and Wasp CEOs like lint; the man who kept gays out of the military but endorsed gay parents as long as they create a home with love and discipline; a geology major who became, in the words of Gerald Ford and the view of many others, "the best public speaker in America"; the product...
Dorothy Parker wanted to call her (unwritten) autobiography Mongrel, presumably reflecting her Wasp-Jewish heritage. Douglas applies the word to the polyglot nature of the new culture, which was profoundly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. Writers like Langston Hughes who settled in and around Strivers Row in Upper Manhattan gave distinctive voice to the aspirations of American blacks. "Aframerican" musicians like Duke Ellington entertained white audiences at Harlem's Cotton Club with an exotic new idiom, jazz, that became one of America's enduring gifts to the world...