low-born

The four band members were low-born Northerners from a dingy port town with no formal education; their success was against the natural order of things, an act of effrontery.

Gaveston was low-born, arrogant, prone to insulting the nobility, and was hoovering up titles and wealth at the expense of those who thought themselves more entitled.

He managed to offend several members of the nobility with his offhand manner towards visitors he did not like, and by his flouting of protocol by allowing his low-born common-law wife a place of honour at table.

“The world of ‘Bridgerton’ is a world where we’re very clear about how the color of your skin doesn’t determine whether you’re high- or low-born.”

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people there, not from what they looked like, as one might in the US, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy – in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanour, behaviour and a visible expectation of centrality.