Little Lord Fauntleroy

Coined by English-American playwright and author Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1886, in her novel Little Lord Fauntleroy. The title character (a boy who grows up in poverty but inherits the title of Lord Fauntleroy) is depicted as generous and charmingly innocent rather than spoilt or greedy, but changing social mores led to the character being seen as effeminate and priggish. By the 1930s, around the time of the release of the 1936 film Little Lord Fauntleroy, the name had come to be a term of abuse for a snobby or fussy man or boy.