Wealth & Money Quote by John Ciardi

A little social acid dressed up as etiquette, Ciardi's line needles the fantasy that class is an essence rather than a balance sheet. "Gentility" sounds like character: restraint, taste, "good breeding". Ciardi strips it down to residue, a cultural afterimage that survives when the cash doesn't. The joke lands because it refuses to flatter either side. Old money isn't praised for refinement; it's accused of leaving behind a veneer. And the broke descendants aren't redeemed by nobility; they're reduced to curating manners like heirlooms they can still afford to display.

The phrasing matters. "Left over" is kitchen language, not aristocratic language. It implies staleness, a reheated performance of privilege. "Rich ancestors" turns status into inheritance, not achievement, and "after the money is gone" supplies the punchline: gentility can outlive wealth because it's portable, teachable, and socially useful. It's a technology for passing as "still one of us", even when the ledger says otherwise.

Ciardi, writing in a mid-century America obsessed with mobility and suspicious of elites, is also catching a very American hypocrisy: we claim to hate class, then keep rewarding its signals. The subtext is that manners can be a kind of soft currency, converting yesterday's fortune into today's credibility. Gentility isn't virtue here; it's a well-trained accent, a posture, a set of cues that keep doors ajar when the estate has been sold.