to the manner/manor born

Used to elegance and luxury. This term originated with Shakespeare, who in Hamlet (1.4) wrote, “Though I am native here, And to the manner born,—it is a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance.” Although Hamlet was discussing his father’s corpse waking and carousing, so that manner here simply means “way of doing things,” it later was often corrupted to manor, meaning the home of the well-to-do, and so the expression came to mean high-born and therefore accustomed to the best of everything. O. Henry played with it in The Venturers (1910): “He ordered dinner with the calm deliberation of one who was to the menu born.” A delightful British television comedy series of the 1970s may have helped preserve the cliché with its title To the Manor Born, but it may be dying out nevertheless.