Self-styled Titles
Sometimes someone makes up a false title that does not even purport to belong to an existing nation. Those who do this may then grant other false titles or honors, or a membership in a false or self-styled order of chivalry, to other persons in exchange for payment, gifts, or donations. Sometimes in order to support the illusion of legitimacy for a falsely assumed title, one or more web sites (or even an elaborate collection of mutually referencing web sites) are created that feature or list a person who has assumed a false title. Often these web sites can appear to be themselves quite legitimate and convincing (sometimes amazingly so), but really only serve to try to legitimize the person who has assumed a false title.
Read more about this topic: False Titles Of Nobility
Famous quotes containing the words self-styled and/or titles:
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)