Having social pretensions; self-consciously genteel.
the fancy sons of lace-curtain Boston lawyers
Example sentencesExamples
He was fast and he had a pretty good ear but he had the terrible inferiority complex of the lace-curtain Irish and he never learned that it doesn't matter a damn where you come from socially; it is where you go.
That hotel, once a popular spot for the lace-curtain Irish, still stands, though today it is a retirement home.
I once directed a film about youth hockey in Boston's West Roxbury section, a classic lace-curtain Boston Irish neighborhood, filled with families moving up from poorer parts of the city.
So he made James Tyrone merely theatrical royalty and his wife Mary a preening lace-curtain Irish-American parochial schoolgirl, and grounded their tragedy in the everyday middle-class friction of family life lived in close quarters.
Definition of lace-curtain in US English:
lace-curtain
adjective
informal
Having social pretensions; self-consciously genteel.
the fancy sons of lace-curtain Boston lawyers
Example sentencesExamples
That hotel, once a popular spot for the lace-curtain Irish, still stands, though today it is a retirement home.
He was fast and he had a pretty good ear but he had the terrible inferiority complex of the lace-curtain Irish and he never learned that it doesn't matter a damn where you come from socially; it is where you go.
So he made James Tyrone merely theatrical royalty and his wife Mary a preening lace-curtain Irish-American parochial schoolgirl, and grounded their tragedy in the everyday middle-class friction of family life lived in close quarters.
I once directed a film about youth hockey in Boston's West Roxbury section, a classic lace-curtain Boston Irish neighborhood, filled with families moving up from poorer parts of the city.