WordWealth: bon ton

bon ton , n.

During the Civil War the author's father, Charles Francis Adams, was Lincoln's Minister to England. Charles Francis made a brilliant, long-fought, and ultimately successful effort to prevent British intervention on the Confederate side. Henry was his dad's private secretary, went to dinner parties with London's pro-Southern bon ton, and made an effort of his own—"the effort of facing a hostile society ... when one is exasperated, furious, bitter and choking with tears over the blunders and incapacity of one's Government." So strong were Adams's emotions that when news of Gettysburg arrived in London and Adams was publicly hugged by a Union supporter, he was not embarrassed although he was from Boston. "That evening, for the first time in his life, he happened not to be thinking of himself." —— P. J. O'Rourke; Third Person Singular; the prototype of the modern thinker; The Atlantic; Dec 2002

The "third way" tag was mocked for its vagueness and Tony Blair, despite his bon ton, has never been Mr Jospin's soul brother. Yet what the French call left realism has turned out to have much in common with government as practised in Copenhagen, Berlin and London. Socialism - the transformation of capitalism - is dead all over. Paris postures but liberal nostrums hold sway in approaches to trade and profit seeking enterprise. The centre-left's calling card has been keeping the welfare state running alongside globalisation. —— David Walker in Right-in-waiting; The Guardian; May 10, 2001
 

Here, braving the bon ton of New York in the early 1900s, he seemed uncomfortable throughout, as if he had been invited to an Edith Wharton party for which he was not suitably dressed. —— Stanley Kauffmann, "Women in Danger," New Republic, January 15, 2001

The bon ton here is to be grave and learned. —— Horace Walpole

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