Word: snob
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After 20 years of marriage which have brought him wealth, position, and two attractive daughters, Steel Executive Barry Sullivan staggers his wife by asking for a divorce. Flashbacks show how Bette grew from simple beginnings into a money-hungry snob who tried to shape her husband into her own image of success. Then she goes off on a cruise, learns something about loneliness, drifts from self-pity to remorse, is tearfully ready at last to patch things...
...possesses some of the intellectual arrogance of one of his chief critics-Robert Taft. He is a highly civilized man, an intellectual snob, with a snob's best qualities-stubborn convictions, a confidence in his own discrimination, and a certainty about his own judgment that would not let him turn his back on fellow Harvardman Alger Hiss, even after Hiss had been convicted. His famous Hiss remark (which he carefully rehearsed with aides before uttering to the press) is defended by his admirers as loyalty toward a friend, but it was the height of impropriety in a Secretary...
...soon got on signature terms with everyone from Arnold Bennett to George Bernard Shaw. A few literary lions headed into the deep bush when they scented Fred on their trail. Poet John Masefield, for instance, responded to Fred's advances with a "chilly" printed card, and that "awful snob" Rudyard Kipling, trapped by Fred outside a museum, "raised his stick as I raised my hat." But for the most part Fred managed to turn his literary relationships into a neat, profitable routine...
...snobbiest snob of all, says Lynes, is the Reverse Snob or Anti-Snob Snob: "This is the snob who finds snobbery so distasteful that he (or she) is extremely snobbish about nearly everybody since nearly everybody is a snob about something." Lynes finds himself guilty above all of Reverse Snobbism. "I am sure there is no greater snob," he concludes archly, "than a snob who thinks he can define a snob...
...would serve the author right for his false modesty if his readers agreed. But they may also be grateful for a brisk introduction to the minor social science of Snob Psychology...