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by Liz Walter

My last post looked at ways of describing how important someone is in an organization, for example at work or in the armed forces. This post covers some more general ways of talking about how important someone is in a society, or how important other people make them feel.

The elite are the richest and most powerful people in society. The rest of us are ordinary people or, in an informal and insulting term, the little people:

She was a member of the country’s elite.

Ordinary people can’t afford prices like these.

I don’t pay taxes – they are for the little people.

Another insulting way of talking about someone you do not believe to be at all important is to call them a nobody, while someone who has been treated as though they are less important or less respected than others might say that they were made to feel like a second-class citizen:

I’m not letting some nobody tell me what to do.

People from outside the area were often treated as second-class citizens.

The abbreviation VIP means ‘very important person’ and is used to describe someone who gets special treatment because they are rich, famous, or influential.  Slightly more informally and often jokingly, we might refer to such people as anyone who’s anyone or, in British English, the great and the good:

There is a special area where VIPs can rest or have something to eat.

Anyone who’s anyone was invited to the wedding.

His memorial service was a gathering of the great and the good.

Movers and shakers are people who have a lot of power and influence, while a grandee is someone with a lot of power or influence in an organization, often someone who has been in it for a long time:

We met with some of the movers and shakers in the entertainment industry.

Republican grandees have expressed concerns about the issue.

To finish, I’ll cover a few terms connected with social position. The word class is used to talk about people with the same economic and social position. It is often used in compound words such as upper class, middle class, lower class, or working class. These terms can all be made into adjectives by adding a hyphen:

He was expected to marry someone from the same class.

These policies are hurting the middle class.

She came from a working-class family.

If people move to a higher social class, we sometimes say that they go/come/move up in the world, while if their fortunes worsen, they go/come/move down in the world:

Some people lost their homes, while others went up in the world.

Their family owned the entire village at one time, but they’ve come down in the world since then.

Perhaps we should all try to remember the words of one of the US founding fathers, George Mason, who famously said, ‘We came equals into this world, and equals shall we go out of it.’