From a book review by Martin Filler in the August 10, 2025 New York Review of Books Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America by Michael M. Grynbaum, he drops this term which is news to me:
poshlost:
But the best of them all at capturing Condé Nast’s sickly overload of pretense and privilege is Francine du Plessix Gray’s psychologically penetrating 2005 memoir of Liberman’s marriage to her mother, Tatiana du Plessix Liberman, another Russian-born émigré to France and thence to the US in 1941. Titled Them, like a Fifties horror movie, it mercilessly unmasks these monstres sacrés of midcentury New York high life. In Gray’s retelling their saga becomes pure poshlost, that untranslatable Russian word beloved by Nabokov, denoting vulgarity and false cultural importance.