[panative]

That isn’t the sense it’s used in Pennsylvania at all. A side hill dirt farmer with one striped shirt he wears six days a week and goes to a Methodist church every Sunday and a mustache with his beard is “hoch” and a man who wears solid black and white with buttons and suspenders and no belt or mustache, drives a buggy to church at a district members house every other week and owns a mill that employs 500 people is a “Kirche/Plain” person.

[em-bee]

can you elaborate please? the way i read this it directly contradicts what you say here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903436

“hooche Leit” is PA dialect for standard German “hohe Leute,” literally “high people” in the sense of “fancy” people

but that supports what i said, because upper class people are also fancy.

[wildfireday2]

“Fancy” is has a very specific meaning as as opposed to “plain” here and “upper class people are also fancy” is not generally true. “Plain” refers very specifically to lifestyle rules and modes of dress and sometimes speech adopted by conservative Anabaptists, most notably Amish, and historically, Quakers (very few of whom are meaningfully plain anymore although “simplicity” is still taught as a Quaker value). It has nothing to do with social class, there are many examples of plain peoples who were better off as a whole than their “fancy” neighbors. Fancy, in the context of plain people in America, is just anyone who lives according to the dominant culture or otherwise isn’t bound by the rules of plain people. Those being things like what kind of fasteners or colors you can have on your clothes, what kinds of hats men wear, head coverings and dress standards for women, etc., and for the Amish extending to bans on mains electricity, automobiles or self propelled vehicles, etc.

[ButlerianJihad]

Closely related, and not limited to the sects which you mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement

[wildfireday2]

They may have some theological distinctions but they aren’t related to the plain/fancy distinctions at all. Holiness/methodists are culturally extremely mainstream and Methodists have always been at the forefront of uniting church with “popular” worldly culture, as opposed to the separatism (in particular of culture down to dress and technology) of plain people. Holiness/Wesleyan people are “fancy.” So are almost all contemporary Quakers and many or most mainline Mennonites.