Word of the Week: Louche

Louche: Of questionable taste or morality; decadent. Pronunciation: loosh. From French louche, “squinting” or “cross-eyed”; originally Latin lusca, “one-eyed.”

Louche is one of those words you can go years without seeing in print, and then—wham! It’s everywhere. As it has been in the last few weeks.

Just last Friday, I saw louche in two reviews of the new comedy Get Him to the Greek. Here’s Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The rock star (Russell Brand) is louche and blase, utterly confident and completely uncaring about whether he gets there or not.

And Dana Stevens in Slate:

In that film [Forgetting Sarah Marshall], directed by Nicholas Stoller, Jonah Hill had a small part as an obsequious waiter who hovered about Snow, bedazzled by his aura of louche self-regard.

Then I remembered that I’d seen louche a couple of times recently in the New York Times’s Sunday book-review section. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction, by Judith Thurman, to a new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex:

When she lost her faith as a teenager, her dreams of a transcendent union (dreams that proved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchanting classmate named ZaZa and to a rich, indolent first cousin and childhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her a taste for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she never outgrew.

And here, from the following week’s review, is a passage from an essay by Dwight Garner about Russian poets:

The poets of the thaw era were liberating figures, and have frequently been likened to the West’s most word-drunk rockers and singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell,Leonard Cohen. They were political, sexy, a bit louche and sometimes ridiculous.

Yesterday’s book-review section contained this quote from a collection of essays by Henry Fairlie:

“Even in the louche world of Fleet Street,” Jeremy McCarter writes in the introduction to this collection, Fairlie “distinguished himself: he drank; his finances were a crime against responsibility; his charm and darkly handsome looks availed him of endless affairs.”

In its evolution from a physical description to a social one, louche is reminiscent of its French cousin gauche, which literally means “left,” as in “left-handed.” (The ancient superstition about left-handedness also survives in the metaphorical meaning of sinister, Latin for “left.”)

Louche is less common in speech than in writing. What is common, at least in the United States in recent years among people under, say, 35, is a newish usage of sketchy to mean . . . well, louche. Most of the major dictionaries* define sketchy only the way I learned it and still use it: rough, incomplete, “resembling a sketch.” But as linguist Mark Liberman wrote in Language Log earlier this year, sketchy has acquired the additional—or perhaps replacement—meaning of “questionable, iffy, untrustworthy, unsafe, poor quality, creepy, deprecated.” Examples include “a sketchy neighborhood” and “a sketchy driving record.” (Louche, by contrast, is generally used only to describe people.)

Commenters on the Language Log unofficially antedate the louche use of sketchy back to the 1970s; for my own part, I started noticing it only in the last eight to ten years. (And I always assumed it was a mistake.) Grant Barrett provides a plausible origin of the term in the vocabulary of crystal-meth users; it’s supported by Urban Dictionary’s users (of course).

I enjoy a good semantic shift, but as long as conflicting definitions—“resembling  a sketch” is not a synonym for “creepy”—are still in circulation, there’s a high likelihood of confusion. The situation reminds me of the idiom “on the up-and-up.” I’ve always known the expression to mean only one thing: “honest,” “ethical”—the opposite of louche, in fact. But it turns out that not everyone agrees.

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* Merriam-Webster’s is the only major dictionary that provides the newer, colloquial definition.

Comments

[twitter.com/hush6]

I am unduly fond of the word louche. Whenever I hear it or see it, I am instantly and powerfully reminded of my late, great friend Denis Lemon, the publisher of the UK's Gay News, from whose lips I first heard it. Sometimes words are like aromas from childhood — they can be time machines.

[Jessica]

Love louche, but it's definitely used to describe locations of the seedy or seamy variety. In French you'd refer to a "quartier louche," a disreputable neighborhood. My favorite user of the term is Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, the king of the "quartier louche."

[Nancy Friedman]

Thanks for clarifying, Jessica. "The louche world of Fleet Street" certainly qualifies as well. But generally speaking (as I carefully phrased my statement), I've seen "louche" used in U.S. English mostly for personal descriptions.

[Jan Freeman]

I thought I remembered learning "louche" in connection with the man Germaine Greer was once briefly married to, and yes, thank you Google Books, here it is from Greer's collection, "The Madwoman's Underpants":

"He [Paul du Feu] is a very sexy man, in a battered and nuggety sort of way, and subsequently the underground press did manage to run very louche and tasteless pictures of him, but for Cosmo he was as thoroughly camouflaged as any playmate."

As this (I think) shows, another distinction between "sketchy" and "louche" is that "louche" can be attractively wrong-side-of-the-tracks, while "sketchy" is never desirable.

[Nancy Friedman]

Jan: Thank you for that marvelous passage. It was Germaine Greer who introduced me to "feckless," which she used on every third page in one of her books (can't remember which at the moment). It made me wonder whether you could call someone "feckful."

[panavia999]

haha! My mother also picked up feckless from Germaine Greer. She loved using the word. She even named a funny little tomcat Feck (because he wasn't feckless, and she just liked the word.) I've always thought of louche as rather like "kitsch" in that it's essentially useless and tasteless but somehow likeable, or at least not contemptible.

[panavia999]

There is a book review in the Wall street Journal for "Furious Love"
By Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, about Liz Taylor and Richerd Burton.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703433704575303743290834292.html

QUOTE Far more interesting are the tales of life among the A-listers, none more riveting than a drunken party during which, according to Burton, Rachel Roberts abused her husband, Rex Harrison, "sexually, morally, physically and in every other way." As something of a grand finale to the evening, Roberts set upon her dog. Guest Tennessee Williams, who had a high tolerance for louche behavior, asked to leave. "Let's face it," Ms. Taylor once said, "a lot of my life has lacked dignity."
UNQUOTE
Now that's louche if Tennessee Williams couldn't take it!