New Lexicon Skewers The Hamptons Lifestyle By John Riordan Take Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” substitute the word “Hamptons” for “England” during John of Gaunt’s famous soliloquy, and you’ll have a fairly good idea of Miles Jaffe’s perspective on “This Blessed Plot, This Earth, This Realm ...” The Bridgehampton artist, writer, and designer has summoned all his powers of indignation to fuse his diverse vocations into a new one: lexicographer. Mr. Jaffe’s new book, “The Hamptons Dictionary: The Essential Guide to Class Warfare,” surveys the area with an unsparing eye. Mr. Jaffe’s clearest influence is not Shakespeare but Ambrose Bierce, author of the “The Devil’s Dictionary,” and to whom Mr. Jaffe acknowledges a debt. He recalled that he was “working on a book that would capture the absurdity” of the Hamptons, “and I started doing a glossary as an aid—but then I realized that the glossary needed to be the book itself. Ambrose Bierce took a word and [satirically] redefined it to make it more acute. I’ve tried to do the same.” The “entries” explain to readers the meaning of terms like “Hamptonization,” “cidiot,” and “heirass.” This compilation of compound words, phrases, and simple redefinitions is well suited to Mr. Jaffe’s sense of “class warfare” and the way such conflicts affect the East End. Mr. Jaffe emphasizes that he has no objection to wealth. Rather, he is concerned with the attitudes it breeds in those who have it. “There’s a real difference between privilege and entitlement. Privilege is something you appreciate. Then there’s entitlement which you take for granted,” he said. “Picture a ‘Master of the Universe’ snapping down an American Express Black card and not getting the royal treatment because that kind of wealth just doesn’t make him special here.” Indeed, Mr. Jaffe defines “anonymity” as “the condition of being a multimillionaire in the Hamptons.” Mr. Jaffe hopes that people who read his dictionary will recognize their behavior in it. “I want to make people think about who they are. I’ve been any number of these people,” he said. “Being able to laugh at yourself is essential.” As Mr. Jaffe was writing the book last summer, individual entries he had compiled appeared weekly in The Southampton Press, many of them accompanied by the biting illustrations of Press editorial cartoonist Jennett Meridan Russell, whose work also is featured in the book. Ms. Russell said she was proud to be part of the project and enjoyed working with Mr. Jaffe—despite his acerbic wit. “If you ever do work for Miles Jaffe, wear body armor,” she quipped. “But what really bugged me was that he was never wrong.” Mr. Jaffe’s definitions were sometimes local expressions, but more often he got his sources from “friends and strangers,” and his own imagination. Mr. Jaffe is the son of the late architect Norman Jaffe, who designed some of the most arresting houses in the Hamptons over four decades, and with whom he moved to the East End in the 1960s. This long and intimate association with the Hamptons has made him an expert on the changes the area has seen over subsequent decades and given him a unique view of that progress. “My father did houses for avant-garde people, [but then] people who aspired to the avant-garde wanted their own Jaffe houses.” Although Norman Jaffe’s striking houses are now coveted by wealthy buyers, this offers little comfort to his son. “You wouldn’t know it from the way they’re tearing them down, ” he said. The remark becomes prologue to Mr. Jaffe’s next comment, which very nearly encapsulates both the theme of “The Hamptons Dictionary,” and the tale of the East End during the last 40-odd years: “The Hamptons used to be a pleasure. Once it became a business, the whole thing changed.” The Southampton Press, June 7, 2007