Awesomeness of Wikipedia strikes again

While looking up the spelling of the phrase en deshabille, I ran across this page on Wikipedia: List of French words used by English speakers. (Curiously, it does not list en deshabille at all.) The best thing about it is the section Only found in English, which lists ostensibly French words and expressions not actually used by the French, including demimonde, pièce de résistance, and double entendre.

Previously: Things I had to look up: en petit comité

technorati: words, Wikipedia

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.

Dept. of Odd ways of putting it

For a few years I have been on a lonely struggle to point out the idiocy of the constant misuse of the word "need," as in this Jezebel post from yesterday titled "Elizabeth Hasselbeck Needs To STFU About Ashley Judd, Abortion." Really? She needs to?? Like she has a need that isn't being met?

I ran across another strange construction this morning. On an online forum, a woman used this odd phrase, twice (emphasis mine):

My lived experience of the last eight years has been that I have carried a lot of hurt and bitterness around...

My lived experience is that I am exhausted and tired by the double standard...

One thing is that those sentences would still make perfect sense if they just began with the word "I." But what does "my lived experience" mean? As opposed to your experience in Second Life? As opposed to the world you have created in your dreams?

Clearly the writer is insecure about simply stating her opinions and needs to -- and it's all right to use the phrase "needs to" when it is not a synonym for the word "should" -- preface them with some phrase that give them more authority. She is saying "I have really lived and felt these things." But why would she think that anyone would doubt it in the first place?

Things I had to look up: fraught

Cris asked, "Is 'fraught' the past tense of the verb 'freight'?"

Huh, good question. Dictionary.com says the words are related. Fraught comes from a Middle Low German word meaning "freight money," which I take to mean the same thing we meant when we ask, "What's the freight on that?" -- that is, the shipping charge, however metaphorical.

Things I had to look up: Enarch (n.)

From David Brooks' column in the NYT:

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life -- that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. ... And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.

What the hell? It sounds like some kind of weird science fiction term. But I found this:

"Enarchy" derives from the acronym ENA, "Ecole Nationale d'Administration", which selects the 25 years old. students who will take the top chief executive jobs in high civil services. Graduate of this school are called "enarchs."

Not sure how you count that in dollars; I suppose Brooks means "Ivy Leaguers and their ilk."

technorati: words, columnists, David Brooks

Things I had to look up: coterie, clique, claque, shill

I wanted to use the word coterie to mean "a small group of like-minded people with a shared interest or goal," but I wasn't sure that was exactly what it meant, so I looked it up. It sort of means that, but it is also a synonym for clique.

Hmm, come to think of it, what is the difference? Clique has more of a sense of exclusivity; the members come together with a sense that non-members are actively excluded. A coterie is less exclusive and more informal, I think.

Then I looked up one of my favorite words, claque. The members of a claque are paid to applaud or cheer; being paid seems an important element. But I thought that's what shill meant. Not quite; a shill is "a decoy who acts as an enthusiastic customer in order to stimulate the participation of others," as in the person who, secretly in league with a three card monte dealer, is allowed to "win" in order to draw others into the game. The word is also used by stage magicians and comedians to refer to confederates planted in the audience.

I'm not sure if there's a better word than coterie for the group of like-minded people who share an interest. We use phrases like "affinity group," but they have a stale, business-consulting taste.

I guess I'll stick with coterie which, by the way, I have been mispronouncing for decades. I thought it was pronounced co-TER-ee-ay as if it were French, but it's just CO-ter-ee.

Things I had to look up: soigné

Soigné -- well-groomed, sleek, elegantly maintained. I was looking for a word the other night, some French word that would capture an attitude of, sort of, luxuriating insouciance. I thought of soigné but that's not right. I thought it was like èlan and had more to do with attitude. Still looking.

Things I had to look up: bien pensant

bien pensant -- A French term meaning "right-minded" or "right-thinking," it is used as a literary term in English to refer to those who adopt the orthodoxy of others to substitute for their own thoughts and opinions.

Context: In a long profile of V.S. Naipaul in the Guardian/Observer:

By 1971, the year in which he won the Booker Prize for In A Free State, Naipaul's literary self was fully at large in the world and would fuel three decades in which he travelled a long way from the comedy of his early fiction to the more sinister images of A Bend in the River, his masterpiece, and the later, more personal fictions, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. His journalism and incessant travelling took him into the muslim world of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief and made him enemies among bien pensant western liberals as well as muslims. Today, he exudes the satisfaction of one who has been proved substantially right about Islam. He says he does not like some of the controversy he has aroused, but affects insouciance. 'When I read those things, I am immensely amused. They don't wound me at all.'

I was not aware of this phrase's origins, so when I see it baldly translated and used without irony as an adjective -- as in this sentence from an editorial today about the suppression of demonstrations in Tibet:

The current protests in Tibet and the response of the Chinese authorities have attracted the attention of every right-thinking man or woman with access to the free media, and the vast majority of the people are sympathetic toward the Tibetans

One has to wonder if people who use the phrase without irony are aware that it's supposed to be used ironically. Or is it possible that using the French version carries irony that the English cannot?