Word: parvenus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world. Each year it handles $75 million worth of property, in 1957 sold $28 million worth-and made $2,250,000 in fees. Last week Previews' president, white-haired John Colquhoun Tysen, 45, was off on an annual world tour to sew up new deals with pashas and parvenus, unemployed royalty and hard-headed businessmen...
...hard to fault his eloquence. On the approaching marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, he mocked: "The fiancé of Miss Vanderbilt is descended...through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty, bartering to parvenus for bread an empty dukedom bought with a female relative's dishonor." Brann scoffed at James Whitcomb Riley, "the poetical ass with the three-story name," railed at a clergyman-critic as a "monstrous bag of fetid wind," adding: "The man who can find intellectual food in [his] sermons could...
...Guard. The rise of the TV era in Hollywood has placed the movie people, themselves long cast as parvenus, in the odd role of the social old guard. Social Arbiter Mike Romanoff, the town's leading restaurateur, sniffs at the "dirty shirt" school that he finds prevalent among TV performers as well as newcomers to films. Says he: "The TV actors can afford to eat here, but they haven't progressed beyond the drugstore counter. They think differently, behave differently, live differently. The dirty shirt is a form of snobbery, you know. We're snobs...
...Waugh writes of the life and death of ruling-class commandomen with the authority of one who took part in raids on Bardia in Libya and fought in Yugoslavia. His eye for the ridiculous still flashes quick as a pistol. He can still write crushingly of spivvish parvenus and loony Hebridean lairds. But the formerly ferocious satirist continues to broaden and deepen the fascinating experiment, begun in Men at Arms, of doling out uncertain portions of esteem and even affection to such characters as share his 18th century Tory's devotion to God, King and Country. As one result...