Sunday, February 22, 2009

Things I had to look up: en petit comité

From Bolaño's The Savage Detectives:
... we ended up getting used to those fucking shrooms and that's what we usually ordered, shrooms from Oaxaca, shrooms from Tamaulipas, shrooms from La Huasteca in Veracruz or Potosí, or wherever they were from. Shrooms to do at our parties or in petit comité.
En petit comité -- in a small group, or as this dictionary of colloquial French has it, "in a group of a few intimate friends."

This page asks, "¿Qué significa "petit-comité"?" The response: Se dice que se requiere hacer una cosa "en petit comité" para referirse a una situación donde es necesario o se desea hacer algo "en familia". Mm-hmm.

Strangely, most results on Google are uses of the phrase in the context of Spanish.

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