What are differences in meaning of “rich”, “wealthy”, “affluent”?

*作者：Lee Ballentine, surrealist, poet, engineer, six time Top Writer on Quora.

One of the downsides of wealth is
that the rich don’t get to decide how the rest of us describe them. They
can spend their wealth any way they wish but they don’t get to define
it. And none of the words discussed here are terribly nice. Envy and
resentment are close to the surface whenever these words are in the air,
in America at least. Every one of them has baggage.

Well-off has a little tinge of scorn to my ear. Like “well-done” applied to a
steak. Parallelisms maximize the friction in any metaphor (see
“well-fixed” below).

Well-to-do is old fashioned. His
family is well-to-do. There’s a certain vagueness here, a vector
pointing backward toward a genteel world that no longer exists, before
it became possible to google someone’s name and “net worth.”

Well-heeled also means wealthy, but suggests the trappings of wealth: clothes and cars and houses, but especially clothes.

Well-fixed is nicely finetuned for ironic effect. We get the resonances of
fixidness, of all those unfortunates who get “fixed up” with a blind
date. The revenge contexts of “fix” are invoked too, like “fix his
wagon” and “fix him for good and all.” Certain vanished anachronisms
live on unseen in the interstices of the new world. The fix is in.

Affluent has an aura of euphemism gone awry. We can’t help but think of words
like “effluent” and “afflatus.” It brings out the comic nature of wealth
that’s present in, for instance, Shakespeare. Few things are more
comical than a rich man being cuckolded by his young wife, or a fat
merchant overloading his mule train with casks of gold while the
bodyguards get drunk and fall asleep. “Affluence,” through sheer
dysphonia, summons laughter rather than preciseness, yet “affluent” is a
little lower than “wealthy” too, lighter in the all-important zeros.

Moneyed tends to apply to groups rather than individuals. The Ivy League is no longer quite the preserve of the moneyed class.

Wealthy is so often said with a sigh. We have only to read “But she came from a
wealthy family” and all the cliches light up–the unsuitable boyfriend,
their unsuccessful weekend in the country, her father’s attempts to be
friendly, struggles with the silverware, the whole kit and caboodle.
Wealth is a religion for so many people, and the word carries a weight
of history, mostly comic. Yet “wealthy” is also a euphemism, a little
less crass than “rich.”

Rich is the word that comes
closest to honesty. Its single syllable sounds best when spoken through
slightly clenched teeth gripping a good cigar. There’s a 19th century
fullness to “rich” that absolutely suggests a riverboat poker game at a
table with a gold pocket watch in every seat, an Arab striding through a
shopping mall wearing a Rolex, a middle-aged man in a burnished suit
with a really good haircut, a woman stepping out of a Rolls at the curb
of the Plaza Hotel or the Connaught or the Raffles. “Rich” and “hotel”
seem to go together.

And rich is equally defined reverso–a
teenage girl walking down the street with “rich bitch” on her T-shirt.
Or some other of a million slogans. “Get rich or die trying.”

But we can’t forget: “that’s rich!” is a way of saying “that’s hilarious!”

In
the American cultural landscape, the chances are that “rich” is the
word you’re looking for. It’s the word embraced alike by those frankly
pursuing riches and by those who scorn them. And hard as it is for the
former to accept, the latter group are real too.

（本文转自：https://www.quora.com/English-language-What-are-differences-in-meaning-of-rich-wealthy-affluent）