Word: milieu
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Today their descendants worry about not getting enough of it. The business lunch, for example, was once a two-plus martini milieu in which to cut a deal or woo a client. Now trust is more often won by a show of efficiency and orders for monkfish and mineral water. Water snobbery has replaced wine snobbery as the latest noon-hour recreation. People order their eau by brand name, as they once did Scotch. The fastidious will not take it on the rocks, because ice bruises the bubbles. Only aspiring starlets drink Perrier ("designer water," sniff detractors). Evian is Hollywood...
...earnest radicalism of the 1930s has become familiar terrain for fiction. Chaim Potok, a chronicler of the factions within American Jewish culture (The Chosen, My Name Is Asher Lev), assiduously attempts to freshen the milieu: his title character and narrator is a thoughtful, believable preadolescent girl; her father is a celebrated radical journalist from an old-line, plutocratic Wasp family, her mother a Jewish emigre...
...third novel, as in his 16 plays, Gurney remains a mordantly comic eulogist whose strengths are mood, milieu and character. The title refers to a black-tie dance, the grandest event on the social calendar back when there was a Society. The privileged crowd thinned out in the '60s, when the young singles and couples moved on to other cities or, more likely, the suburbs, to alcohol or to the angry consciousness of the Viet Nam epoch. Two decades later, a couple of nostalgic veterans of the deb-party circuit decide to revive the Snow Ball. Cooper Jones...
...modified random system say group identification in Houses would be destroyed by such a change. Yet they fail to realize that while people can always find some friends in the 350-or-more-person Houses,' smaller groups of people often feel shoved to the outer parameters of the social milieu dominated by a strong central group on which the reputation is founded. In addition, the random system's opponents forget that students can find crossroads outside their Houses where they can associate with students sharing their interests. Football players, for example, can congregate at practice...
Pity the genre novelist who embarks on a different course. For more than 25 years, Françoise Sagan has published brief, ironic tales of love lost or betrayed. She is a supremely confident writer, both in her resolute economy of style and in her command of the milieu she describes: the frivolous, overwrought bourgeois society where emotion can be both teased and indulged...