A.Word.A.Day --lace-curtain

A.Word.A.Day

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Oct 13, 2025

This week’s theme
Idioms & metaphors

This week’s words
lace-curtain
stile
millstone
lightning rod
moral compass

The Irish in St. Louis: From Shanty to Lace Curtain by Patrick Murphy

Cover: Reedy Press

Previous week’s theme
Words with a bossy past

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Language is an attic crammed with memories. What you find there are not just literal objects. Much of what’s stored away has meaning layered upon meaning.

A shell, for instance, may not just be a shell. It might recall that wistful afternoon on the beach when you met someone, shared a smile, and hesitated to ask for their number. (And now it is your regret-shell.)

Words, too, gather significance over time. This week, we’ll explore words that work double shifts. They mean what they mean, and then some. Use them any way you like: literally or figuratively (but figurative is more fun).

lace-curtain

PRONUNCIATION:

(LAYS-kuhr-tuhn)

MEANING:

adjective: Aspiring to or pretentiously displaying middle-class respectability.

ETYMOLOGY:

From the lace curtains once fashionable in middle-class homes. Earliest documented use: 1824.

NOTES:

The expression arose in 19th-century America, often among Irish immigrants themselves, to draw a class line between the lace-curtain Irish -- those striving for middle-class refinement -- and the shanty Irish, who were poorer and lived in simple one-room cabins. The term has traces of both classism and ethnic prejudice from that era.

Today, the term survives as a light jab at anyone decorating their life a bit too finely while hoping no one peeks behind the curtain. Also see iron curtain.

USAGE:

“[Bill] Cunningham begins his story at his middle-class Catholic home in ‘a lace-curtain suburb of Boston’.”
Lucy Scholes; Style of His Own; The Independent (London, UK); Oct 14, 2018

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters. -Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US Congress member (b. 13 Oct 1989)

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