I thought the upper classes knew how to talk proper?
The extreme accent of the upper classes known as Cut Glass or Chinless Wonder has largely vanished.
Lyttelton himself has commented on the term but credits Runyon with coining it; he once stated in an interview, "In jazz circles, aggressively "upper class" characters are known as Hoorays, an adaption, I believe, of Damon Runyon's "Hooray Henries".
Writing with easy authority, Mr. Carter does a nimble -- and at times gently satiric -- job of delineating the competitive, even catty academic world that Talcott inhabits, and he does an even more persuasive job of conjuring up the rarefied world of the black upper class that Talcott knew as a child in Washington and on Martha's Vineyard.
It reminds me of when there was a whole thing being made about wearing sagging pants and a lot of the upper class kids I knew made a big deal of liking to wear nice clothes and what not, it was sort of like this weird act to show superiorority, and the problematic racial politics of the whole thing were very evident (the same applies for this tweet, as well).
Edward St. Aubyn's subject is the British upper class, a social stratum known to most of us only through celebrity gossip or "Masterpiece Theater," and the techniques with which he guides us through the arcane hierarchy of competing snobberies seem, at first, old-fashioned -- a style of social comedy more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today.
Kaplan knows how; Princeton Review knows how, and middle-class and upper-class parents know how".
But then, Bloom likes to speculate that perhaps the English have been so anti-Semitic because of their upper-class love of sadomasochism (you know, those dodgy boarding schools of theirs).
At the next stage of development, rather predictably, we find the brooding Jewish homosexual at Harvard, at once scorning and longing for the upper-class boys known as "the Lads," with their Waspish good looks and their "depthless self-satisfaction".
In order to write well about 1856, however, he felt that he needed to go back to 1825, when the upper-class rebels known as the Decembrists were executed and exiled.
