louche

,LOUCHE ,

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MEANING

louche  [loosh]  adj.  
➤ of questionable taste or morality; decadent: 
"a louche nightclub"; "a louche painting. —Wordnet 1.7.1

➤ disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way":  
"the louche world of the theater. —NOAD

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ORIGIN

"Louche" ultimately comes from the Latin "luscus," meaning "blind in one eye" or "one-eyed." This Latin term gave rise to the French "louche," meaning "squinting, cross-eyed" or "shady, devious." English speakers borrowed the term in the 19th century, using it to describe both people and places of questionable repute. —Merriam-Webster.com

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 IN USE

Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2010

[Headline] ➢ New York Fashion Week: Luxe and louche at Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's the Row

Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen drew all the industry movers and shakers to the first runway show for the Row, their 3-year-old label that already sells at the world's top stores.

What makes the line so successful is its luxe louche-ness. 

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➢Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, turned louche sexuality into high fashion in the 1990s.  — Times Topics, The New York Times, Thursday, April 29, 2010. 

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➢ Most of Irma La Douce was filmed on the back lot of the Goldwyn studio. They had put up a beautiful reproduction of a street near Les Halles--the shops, the bistros, the louche hotels. The most gorgeous starlets in town were cast as the whores. —cselfstyledsiren.blogspot.com

Irma la Douce (1963)
moviegoods.com


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Example sentences from the OED:

➢ You could play Snobby. I want a slim, louche, servant-girl-bigamist, half-handsome sort of rascal. —G. B. Shaw 1905

➢ There had seemed to be something a little louche in the way she had suddenly found herself alone with Ivor. —A. Huxley 1921 

➢ A quick cold clasp now and then in some louche hovel. — W. H. Auden 1945

➢ I knew of a louche little bar quite near here. — E. Waugh 1945

➢ As if he were an unfrocked priest due for reception into the world of the louche and the lost. — P. H. Johnson 1959

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A comment from Wordnik.com

Below is a fully ripened, "de-louce-ish" description of louche, which I found among the comments at Wordnik.com, an online dictionary of current English. Wordnik's goal is "to show you as much information as possible, as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known."  The lively comment you are about to read was written by a Wordnik contributor who uses the nom de blog "rolic," which, I am guessing, he or she borrowed from the word frolic. But I digress. On, now, to rolic's notions about louche: 

Immoral, disreputable, decadent – none of these capture that sleazy yet elegant and brazenly androgynous seductiveness that is at the essence of louche. For me the embodiment of louche (and this is a word that demands to be written in italics, for no other reason than it can't be bothered to stand up straight) is the character "Joel Cairo" in The Maltese Falcon as played by the peerless Peter Lorre, an actor who almost always played louche.  —wordnik.com/words/louche/comments.

 Peter Lorre in

  The Maltese Falcon (1941)

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ADDENDUM: A PUN

“Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, New York: Harper, 2010.

Headline and subhead for The New Yorker book review:


➤Louche Change: Trash Talk from the 2008 Campaign


To catch the reader's eye about a book review that accounts recent changes in English usage, from the civil to the louche, among political candidates, The New Yorker used a pun: "Louche Change," followed by the subhead "Trash talk from the 2008 Campaign."


"Louche Change" exemplifies a sub-category of the pun called paranomasia [PAR-a-no-MAY'-zia], the use of words alike in sound but different in meaning. The pun starts with (1) a paultry image of "loose change" in one's pocket or purse and then moves via the similar-yet-different mechanism of word-play to (2) a verbal change from proper English (downward) to louche English. 


A trash-talk example: "This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it." —Barack Obama, September 2008. 

Hendrick Hertzberg, "Louche Change: Trash talk from the 2008 campaign," The New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2010.

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recondite

At first, the subject matter of this gouache-on-paper assemblage by Henri Matisse may appear recondite, incomprehensible.  But once we learn that the artist titled his work "The Snail," the swirling patches of color do seem to suggest a snail-like image.

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MEANING

recondite  [RəK'-con-dīt]  adj.  

➤ (of a subject or knowledge) little known; abstruse:

the book is full of recondite information.

  

Recondite denotes topics that are known and understood by only a few experts. 

There is often a critical suggestion that difficulty or obscurity has been deliberately sought out or magnified. —NOAD

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Recondite IN USE

➣ And [Cardinal] Ratzinger was renowned at the Vatican for poring through voluminous, recondite theological treatises.—Maureen Dowd, "A Nope for Pope," The New York Times, March 27, 2010.

➣ Indeed, you find autistic savants with stunning skills in recondite fields like prime-number recognition and factoring, who are nevertheless hopeless at simple arithmetic —Christopher Badcock. "The Imprinted Brain," Psychology Today, April 7, 2010

➣ Compared with the Cubist-period work of his near contemporary Picasso — one picture after another that can be like a cheese grater for the eyes — even the most recondite Matisse is pretty beguiling. — Richard Lacayo. "Great leap forward: Matisse in Chicago,"  Apr. 12, 2010.

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SYNONYMS

abstruse, obscure, arcane, esoteric, recherche, profound, difficult, complex, complicated, involved; incomprehensible, unfathomable, impenetrable cryptic, opaque. —OAWT

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ANTONYMS

Exoteric, well-known

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ORIGIN

1649.  Recondite derives from the Latin verb re•con•dere which signifies "store away."  Re- means "away, back"; con- means "together"; and -dere means "to put, to place."  Thus we can think of a complex entity whose elements have been brought "together" and  "placed" in the "back," "away" from all else. 

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RELATED FORMS

rec·on·dite·ly, adv.

rec·on·dite·ness, n.

un·rec·on·dite, adj.

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COMMENT: 

The closest synonym to recondite seems to be abstruse. If this is so, it would be useful to ask, When do we use recondite, and when do we use abstruse? 

OAWT states that we use recondite when dealing with topics that are "known and understood by only a few experts" and that we use abstruse when dealing with topics that are "difficult to understand, puzzling to almost anyone."

Recondite prompts the image of peering through a transparent pane of glass and seeing images only an expert can explain, whereas abstruse suggests trying to look at something through an opaque pane of glass but seeing only vague, unrecognizable shapes. 

I hope my readers perceive what I've written here to be articulate and not recondite or, worse, abstruse. 

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tumbrel or tumbril

Tumbrel

world-travel-photos.com/routard-photo

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MEANING

tumbrel or tumbril  /TUM'bril/ n.  ➤ French two-wheeled dumpcart or wagon designed to be drawn by a single draft animal.

➤ Originally used to carry agricultural supplies, it was most often associated with the cartage of animal manure. 

Synonyms: farmer's cart, farm tipcart, dung cart.

➤ It was also used, however, by artillery units to carry tools and ammunition, and during the French Revolution  it gained wide celebrity as the vehicle used to bear prisoners to the guillotine.   

Synonym: instrument of punishment 

—"tumbrel." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 11 Apr. 2010.

"Sidney Carton and the little seamstress rumble off 

to their deaths in a tumbrel escorted by Jacobins."

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 

Illustration by A. A. Dixon. London: Collins, 1905. 

(From the personal collection of George Gorniak,

 Editor of The Dickens Magazine.)

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ORIGIN

[Middle English tumberell, from Old French tomberel, from tomber, to let fall, perhaps of Germanic origin.] —AHD4


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Tumbrel IN USE

In coats and ties, the University of Denver's men's lacrosse team caught the five-o'clock tumbrel to the Carrier Dome. It was actually a chartered bus, . . . on its way to face off with Syracuse, the No. 1 team in the college world, national champions in 2008, national champions 2009.  —John McPhee, "Pioneer: A star coach goes west,"  The New Yorker, March 22, 2010, 34.

COMMENT

As I read McPhee's sentence, he is using tumbrel in its franco-revolutionary sense as part of a metaphor to signify a bus carrying the University of Denver Lacrosse Team to the Carrier Dome where they most certainly will be roundly defeated by the No. 1 team in the college world, the University of Syracuse.  Sure enough, Syracuse won: 15-9.

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A RELATED TERM

tumbrel remark n ➤ A comment made by a rich person that makes the lower class think of lampposts and guillotines.  Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake," is a tumbrel remark. —The Urban Dictionary

When I first read this definition, I was puzzled by the phrase "lampposts and guillotines."  But a bit of googling promptly enough led me to the answer in an essay titled "The Uses of Diversity" by British critic and essayist Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936):

It is not altogether an accident that, while the London lamp-post has always been mild and undistinguished, the Paris lamp-post has been more historic because it has been more horrible.  It has been a yet more revolutionary substitute for the guillotine — yet more revolutionary, because it was the guillotine of the mob, as distinct even from the guillotine of the Republic. They hanged aristocrats upon it. —GKC: The Uses of Diversity: A Book of Essays Google Books books.google.com, 14-15.

Thus, we could re-phrase the above definition of tumbrel remark to arrive at the following signification, the details of which are admittedly uncomfortably specific:

 ➤ a comment made by a rich person that makes the members of the lower class want to lynch on a lamp post or guillotine the speaker.

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Tumbrel remark IN USE  

Slate essayist Christopher Hitchens claims that past presidential candidate John McCain let slip a tumbrel remark in his "now-notorious answer" to the question of how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, owned.  McCain replied: "I think—I'll have my staff get to you. It's condominiums where—I'll have them get to you." Hitchens recounts that "then everybody [in the room] began acting as if he'd just told all the poor and unemployed to eat cake."  

Hitchens then proceeds to articulate his own archly elaborated definition of tumbrel remark and offers us three more examples of it. 

I account myself as something of an expert on what writer Joyce Cary once called "tumbrel remarks." A tumbrel remark is an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines.

I can give you a few for flavor.

• The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, "I see no point at all in being poor." 

• The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, "That was a lot of money in those days." 

• The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper "in any of my houses."  

—Christopher Hitchens. "Can't we escape this tiresome demagoguery about candidates' income and property?" Slate Updated Monday, Sept. 1, 2008, at 7:05 AM ET.

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bricolage

Don't need no Chevy, no Ford, no Dodge.
Got my own hot Bricolage! —J.C.H.

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MEANING

bricolage /brē-ko-LAZH'/ n  ➤ In art or literature, a construction or creation from a diverse range of available things:  the chaotic bricolage of the novel is brought together in a unifying gesture.

 ➤ Something constructed or created in this way: bricolages of painted junk. —NOAD

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bricolage: v ➤ To make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand. —Claude Levi-Strauss.  Mid 20th century: French, from bricoler 'do odd jobs, repair.'

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bricoleur /brē-ko-LAIR'/ n ➤  A person who engages in bricolage.  Mid 20th century: French, literally 'handyman.' —NOAD

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Bricolage IN USE

➢ There’s a spirit of bricolage running through this [fashion] season, as if designers wanted their clothes to convey as many possibilities as possible. — Armand Limnander, "Group Hug | Paris," Women's Fashion, March 5, 2010.

➢ At the same time it's clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture--including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature . . . , the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mashups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism . . . . —Michiko Kakutani. "Texts Without Context," The New York Times, "Arts & Leisure," March 21, 2010, 25.

➢ Here is a White Christian Nationalist group [the Tea Party] whose worldview is a bricolage of Ayn Rand novels, fundamentalist jeremiads and an ethnically-cleansed "history"  —"GOP, step away from the Tea Party," The Guardian - ‎Mar 22, 2010‎

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COMMENTS on bricolage and bricoleur

In his book The Savage Mind (1962), French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss [klod la'-vi stros] contrasted two types of problem solvers: the Bricoleur, who takes the "do-it-yourself" approach and the Engineer, who works "by-the-book."  Wikipedia explains these two concepts further:  

[bricoleur] has come to mean one who works with his hands, usually in devious or "crafty" ways in comparison to the true craftsman, whom Lévi-Strauss calls the Engineer. The bricoleur  is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in new ways. The Engineer deals with projects in their entirety, taking into account the availability of materials and tools required. The bricoleur approximates "the savage mind" and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind." 

Besides anthropology, bricolage functions usefully in many other disciplines.  Here are a few of them, gleaned from the Wapedia's page on bricolage:

In music, "Instrumental bricolage . . . includes the use of found objects as instruments, such as in the cases of  

• Irish Spoons,   

• humming through a comb and wax paper,

• Trinidadian Steel Drums (made from industrial storage drums),
• African drums and thumb pianos made from recycled pots and pans." 

Not to mention the tinkered sound of Punk.

In the visual arts, "bricolage is [viewed] as a technique where works are construted from various materials on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of postmodern works."  The collage art form is of its essence a bricolage.

In theatrical improvisation, bricolage makes use of  "the stage and the [pantomimed] materials [that] are all made  up on the spot to represent actual things the players know from past experience."

In philosophy the bricoleur has be likened to Coyote, the archetype of the trickster. 

The fashion industry uses the  bricolage style by "incorporating  items typically utilized for other purposes. For example, candy wrappers are woven together to produce a purse."

In television, MacGyver has been described as a "paragon of a bricoleur, creating solutions for the problem to be solved out of available found objects" and the A-Team was known for "creating, mainly weapons, out of any objects available."

Information systems, internet programming, as well as business organization and management, all employ bricolage. To read about its role in these applications, visit (wapedia.mobi/en/Bricolage).

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Needless to say, this bricolage on bricolage has been a pleasure for this bricoleur to bricolage.  

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