Word: wasps
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...ought not, though, to allow ourselves to be trapped in perpetual girlhood because of a poverty of language. After all, some of the aptest sociological terms in our language—“WASP,” say, or “Yuppie”—are of relatively recent coinage. We may not yet feel comfortable calling ourselves women—but we need not call ourselves girls by default. We might, for instance, begin refer to ourselves as “dolls”—a term both more precisely equivalent...
...journey, his heartwarming moments as a doctor. Some of this was camouflage: the tribune of the common man who grew up on Park Avenue and went to prep school. During one debate, Dean talked about how, when Vietnam started, he was at college in New Haven, Conn., the accepted Wasp way of avoiding saying that he went to Yale--as did John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush. But there was also a principle involved: the idea was to keep people focused on what he would do for them...
...insurgent" (Los Angeles Times), "fiery" (New York Observer) self-proclaimed leader of "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the great repository of hope--and donations--from the antiwar, anti-Bush, pro-gay, Michael Moore left. Even so, the Anglophile locution sounded quite natural coming from Dean's thin Wasp lips...
Warren Schmidt moves ponderously. This is not because Jack Nicholson, who plays him to perfection, is particularly weighty or out of shape for a 66-year-old man. What slows him is the rhythms of his region and his culture; he is a Midwesterner of the Wasp persuasion, which means he is solid, stolid and silent, except when exchanging arm's-length pleasantries with his friends. Like so many men of his class and place, he has bent himself to a job (as an insurance company actuary) that is at once dull and intricate and to a city (Omaha...
Although he is also an old-fashioned snob about taste, Epstein well knows that old-fashioned snobbery is dead. The Waspocracy, as he dubs it, is no longer the arbiter of much of anything--particularly when George W. Bush, a genuine Wasp aristocrat, portrays himself as a good ol' Texan with mud on his cowboy boots...