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Definition of "lace-curtain" [lace-curtain]

  • Aspiring to or emulating the middle class. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "lace-curtain" in a sentence
  • "Barstow's special subject, in such novels as the wonderful A Kind of Loving inset left, was what he called the "lace-curtain working class" - the "respectable poor" who, as the friend invoked in his autobiography explains, are acquainted with "poverty, but not squalor"."
  • "Sounding every bit the lace-curtain, pursed-lipped scold, and looking for all the world like a well-coiffed, portly incarnation of what writer Katherine Anne Porter once described as "one of those Irish Catholic girls born with an ingrained fear of sex," Gallagher upbraided Moakler, who is also the director of the Miss California U.S.A. organization, for her "tone" and the organization's response to Prejean."
  • "They argued over who was more Irish: the lace-curtain Irish versus the shanty Irish."