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Oct 13, 2025
This week’s themeIdioms & metaphors This week’s words 
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 GargLanguage 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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