"These distinctions that you draw 'tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seems as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of Hindoos would to you," Eliza returned.
"It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined," [le comte] d'Avaux corrected her. "If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit."
Neal Stephenson, The Confusion
