> I think it's interesting how different people view status, like the "Harvard Professor or Homeless guy?" quiz that used to get passed around.

This is counter-signalling. "I don't have to dress like a high-status individual, because I'm so high status that my high status is clear either way." It's why somewhat intelligent people use big words, but very intelligent people speak plainly: they are so intelligent their intelligence is clear even without the big words, and they want you to know that.

Intelligence is generally correlated with the size of their vocabulary thought.

This is obliviously just a rule of thumb but if you take a pool of 100 well spoken individuals and 100 ... Not well spoken and then give them all some kind of intelligence test, the first group will definitely score significantly higher then the latter.

Yes, I'm aware that non native speaker (I am one of these), but they'd be statistically irrelevant in the context of the general population

Maybe I need to stop using “tautological”, “orthogonal”, etc in my speech… they are so ingrained into me from academic settings but in hindsight and in a professional context there are definitely people politely nodding and either thinking “I’ll look that up later” - or more commonly they’ll know the words just fine and instead it’s “why not just say ‘obvious’ / ‘unrelated’ / etc”.

I like trying to be precise but I think it’s coming at the cost of actual understanding/conveying the wrong status-signal (I don’t want an elitist vibe at work either!)

Or extra words and fancy words are just a waste of everyone's time.

What are some big words? I'm not a native speaker

That's old money. they have had money in their family so long, it is like the air. They display their status by rejecting conspicuous consumption in all but a few instances. The families tend to be extremely protective. In social settings the conversation can appear like active college professors debating, their educations being really what the spend their time honing.

It’s not just old money that this affects - I’ve noticed that new money, once it achieves a certain degree of security (i.e. enough that you don’t have to work, you won’t lose it or find your needs not met bar some catastrophic world-ending or life-ending circumstance), adopts much the same values. I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by wealth and privilege of various different flavours, and you can practically smell the haves and the have-nots - the latter tend to really care, and conspicuously so, about conventional status ladders. The former… give the appearance of not caring about status at all. It isn’t that they don’t, it’s just that they know they’re at the top of the economic tree, and don’t feel the need to compete in that dimension. The well-read/educated thing is more of a status derived from demonstrating how little you care about conventional status ladders, and the less you care, the higher your status, as if you care so little you must be very secure indeed.

This reminds me much of the Dutch society. Although I'm not Dutch, I've lived there twice, and I frequented both old, new and no money circles. What struck me the most among Dutch was how similar a blue collar worker and the president of KLM would look riding a bike down the street.

I don't know, I don't think they would appear low status. Your whole description screams wealth and aristocracy, just not the in your face kind. They probably wouldn't be liked, but I doubt they would appear low status elsewhere.

I guess they would soon adapt to fit in in the new place, and change their status games.

But just for a short while, maybe they'd give an unusual impression?

Some people born with money don't like to think that the only thing that makes them special is the money they have, but didn't earn. Avoiding common endeavors, getting an engineering degree instead of being an artist or running a profitable company instead of a non-profit is a good way of not confronting the reality that in a competitive setting they would be crushed. I know it's a generalization as there are plenty of hard working people born in wealthy families that take advantage of it, as they should, without deluding themselves.

What is WASP? My search results seem to have a lot of noise, like wasps, the insects.

white anglo-saxon protestant. old money types in US context.

>where even the wealthiest people are not allowed to move to because they don't have the right last name

How is this carried out in practice?

Many homes are never sold, but are passed from one generation to the next. When homes are sold, they are first offered informally to other members of the community before being listed, so they are sold before ever being listed. If people locally have enough money (able to do an all-cash deal quickly) and if it's a nice enough place to live that local demand exceeds supply, the majority of homes might be sold without ever being listed.

If the home is listed, it is listed with one of a few local realtors, who can very subtly steer certain buyers towards and away from certain properties. Even if legal lines are crossed, it's very difficult to prove that laws were broken. It happens less often than it used to, but it still happens. US Senator Corey Booker has at various times shared this story about his family that sheds a bit of light on the phenomenon:

https://www.facebook.com/corybooker/photos/id-like-to-share-...

I'm reasonably sure the author is just making this up. As a US citizen you have wide discretion on where you live, even extending to several other small nations that have signed agreements with the US.

If you're renting or selling property, most of the discretion that used to be afforded to buyer's is now outlawed. But it would require someone willing to pursue a case if they felt they were not sold a home because of their race or whatever.

Funny, this comment reads like something Commander Data would say in Star Trek. He would always respond to the letter of what was said, while completely missing the human context.

It fascinates me that someone who read the parent comment could actually think it was about the legal rights of US citizens. You might as well be claiming it was about hummus :)

So what is it about, then?

The practical ability to move somewhere--e.g. to find a home, place an offer, have it accepted, and then peacefully coexist in the neighborhood.

These are all largely up to the discretion of individuals in the community.

They could legally move there, but they would be shunned from the community, and indeed it may be hard for them to find someone willing to even sell them a house.

I'm pretty sure GGP did not mean they literally could not move there. They could move there and be shunned by society if that's what they are into. But why else would you want to be there except for the society?

No, this is real. There are some small old money communities in the Northeast that behave in very unusual ways. I've spent time in one.

> people are not allowed to move to because they don't have the right last name, or can't trace their lineage to the Mayflower… If you removed these people and put them anywhere else, you'd think of them as low status and strange.

I’ve gotta say, an attitude that someone can’t be your neighbor because their ancestors didn’t have a ticket on some boat is definitely strange, and imo low status, no matter how well read they are.