‖ nouveau pauvre
(nuvo povr)
Pl. nouveaux pauvres. Also fem. nouvelle pauvre (rare).
[Fr., after next.]
A person who has recently become poor. Also (with hyphen) attrib. or as adj., newly impoverished.
| 1965 Punch 27 Oct. 619/1 Maigret, holidaying with his wife in a small Normandy fishing port, is summoned to the home of a morally rotten, nouveau-pauvre family where a maid has died of arsenic poisoning after swallowing her mistress's sleeping draught. 1970 Time 3 Aug. 49 One of every four Americans 65 or over lives at or below ‘the poverty line’. Some of these 5,000,000 old people were poor to begin with, but most are bewildered and bitter nouveaux pauvres, their savings and fixed incomes devoured by spiraling property taxes and other forms of inflation. 1975 Country Life 13 Feb. 413/1 Nouveau-pauvre? Could you do with an extra bedroom? 1975 Harpers & Queen May 101 Crisis for coiffeurs... Some of the nouvelles pauvres are clamouring for Brillo-pad mouse, the new colour and the new texture. |