I was informed by a gentleman whose mother was a Rockefeller that the only question that really mattered when meeting someone was whether they were the sort of person you would invite to dinner. This, some of you might remember, was what motivated Trump to run for office, as neither the old guard of New York nor Palm Beach would invite him to dinner, hurting his feelings and compelling him to prove his mettle by becoming someone “important,” in a Rooseveltian sort of way.

Trump ended up winning the election, but not a seat at the dinner table, for the very reason he was never a suitable dinner guest in the first place. He failed to grasp that being elected president didn’t make you important, but being the sort of person people respected enough to elect as president was the attribute.

Trump got there by being vulgar and ignorant to a cohort that needed to feel heard, and the irony is that the very social failings that caused Trump to be denied the validation by the wealthy and educated may well have endeared him to the cohort who idolize him. Not that he would invite them to dinner or cares, other than to the extent he requires their votes. But I digress.

What differentiates social class? Peter Coy at the New York Times contends that it’s grammar.

Social class can be hard to discern when billionaires wear hoodies and work late into the night instead of dressing resplendently and lounging poolside like the wealthy of the past. But people are as obsessed by class now as ever, so we need to resort to other characteristics to tell who fits where.

Is that what billionaires of the past did, dressed “resplendently” and “lounged poolside”? But the first thing worth noting of Coy’s explanation is his conflation of wealth and social status. Other than August Belmont, Coy would dine alone.

I argue that education has become as important as money in determining class. It’s nice to have both, of course, but an Uber driver with a doctorate in anthropology might look down on the passenger who can’t pronounce the street he’s going to. (And the passenger might look down on the driver — social geometry is funny that way.)

Buried in there is an interesting aside about the nature of humanity, which is that people have a need to look down on others to feel less unworthy themselves. Individually, we compare what we believe to be our strength to others’ weakness to bolster our self-esteem. But the issue Coy raises isn’t about what two individuals in an Uber think of each other, but how society as a whole judges.

The world would be a better place if people stopped worrying about class — whom to include and whom to exclude, who’s up and who’s down — and focused on our shared humanity. But I’m writing about the world as it is, not how I would like it to be.

A half-hearted Gertrude for sure, but a Gertrude nonetheless. If we “focused on our shared humanity,” who would you be friends with, trust, invite to dinner? It’s a cutely insipid phrase, but doesn’t help anyone make the requisite distinctions that allow us to discriminate properly. Yes, we discriminate. All of us. We make choices all the time, often on essentially no information and often on incomplete information. We can’t stop the world, spend a decade getting to deeply know every person with whom we come into contact, and then decide whether or not to shake their hand.

Coy goes on to give a mini-dissertation on the usages of “me and him,” dividing the world into three groups.

When it comes to the phrase “me and him,” I divide people into three camps: those who use it when they shouldn’t; those who don’t use it when they should; and those who use it at just the right times and think poorly of the other two camps.

Ironically, Coy notes that there is a fourth group composed of folks like John McWhorter, whose salary is contingent on making cool and interesting observations about language.

There’s actually a fourth camp that looks upon the three others with detached curiosity. These are linguists who shrug off the pedants and sticklers in the third camp and say their job is to describe the evolving language as it’s actually used. However, even if these academics don’t care about what’s deemed correct or incorrect, they care very much about drawing the connections between language and class.

We all differentiate people based on something, whether money, education, or something else. This might seem a bit judgey, but you’re either judged or you’re ignored. What should social status be based on, wealth, education, the ability to use “me and him” correctly or dressing resplendently?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.