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Parvenu   Listen
Parvenu

noun
1.
A person who has suddenly risen to a higher economic status but has not gained social acceptance of others in that class.  Synonyms: arriviste, nouveau-riche, upstart.
adjective
1.
Characteristic of someone who has risen economically or socially but lacks the social skills appropriate for this new position.  Synonyms: nouveau-riche, parvenue, upstart.
2.
Of or characteristic of a parvenu.  Synonym: parvenue.






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"Parvenu" Quotes from Famous Books



... reveals two characteristic attitudes of mind, the blending of which is apparent throughout the Eskimo culture of to-day. There is the attitude of condescension, the arrogant tolerance of the proselyte and the parvenu: "So our forefathers used to do, for they were ignorant folk." At times, however, it is with precisely opposite view, mourning the present degeneration from earlier days, "when men were yet skilful rowers in 'kayaks,' ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown

... these poor banished Hogtons, thought I,—hateful parvenu! I was pleased when a curve in the shrubberies shut out the house from view, though in reality bringing us nearer to it. And the boasted cascade, whose roar I had heard for some moments, came ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... our Lords' sons Honorable, and so forth; but for a nation as numerous, well educated, strong, rich, civilized, free as our own, to dare to give its distinguished citizens titles of honor—monstrous assumption of low-bred arrogance and parvenu vanity! Our titles are respectable, but theirs absurd. Mr. Jones, of London, a Chancellor's son, and a tailor's grandson, is justly Honorable, and entitled to be Lord Jones at his noble father's decease: but Mr. Brown, the senator ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the other hand was Octavianus? A parvenu, with a nobility altogether too recent! His grandfather was a rich usurer of Velitrae (now Velletri), a financier and a man of affairs; it was only his immediate father who succeeded by dint of the riches of the usurer grandfather in entering the Roman nobility. He had married a sister ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero

... unexampled opportunities for architectural improvement and greatly stimulated the public interest in the art. The feverish and abnormal industrial activity which followed the war and the rapid growth of the parvenu spirit were checked by the disastrous "panic" of 1873. With the completion of the Pacific railways and the settlement of new communities in the West, industrial prosperity, when it returned, was established on a firmer basis. An extraordinary expansion ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin


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