Chaise What?

An original box for a Barbie Go-Together Furniture Kit, circa 1963, is currently on display at the California Design, 1930-1965 exhibit at LACMA.^*

 

“Chaise longue & side table with 3-D garden setting and accessories!”

Mattel no longer sells this kit, but even if it did, I doubt the seating element would be called a “chaise longue,” which is the correct term. (It’s French for “long chair.”) eBay sellers don’t accept that spelling: they all call it a chaise “lounge,” and so do many other Americans. (In Britain, apparently, the chaise longue is seen only in museums.) In fact, hewing to the correct pronunciation and spelling is liable to tag you as (a) a stickler, (b) a snob, (c) an interior decorator, or (d) French.

But beware the recency illusion: “longue” began shifting to “lounge” at least 150 years ago, according to Michael Quinion of World Wide Words. In his terrific memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid^**, Bill Bryson, who was born in 1951, recounts this story from his childhood in Des Moines:

I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.

“What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”

“Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.

“Look again,” urged my father.

“Shays lounge,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.

“Well, it’s just ‘long,’” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr: “Shays lohhhnggg,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at the word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.”

“Lawngg,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

“It’s French,” my father explained.

“Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”

For the record, my family also owned a shays lounge with covers that didn't need to come in at night.

__

* LACMA is one of more than 60 arts institutions participating in Pacific Standard Time, a fascinating and multifaceted retrospective of Southern California art, architecture, and design from 1945 through 1980. I visited six of the participating museums last weekend: the Huntington, the Norton Simon, the Skirball, the Getty, the Hammer, and LACMA. Pacific Standard Time continues through May 2012.

** Highly recommended. The audiobook, which is read by the author, is especially wonderful: Bryson is as lively a reader as he is a writer.

Comments

[rootlesscosmo]

"-gue" as a spelling the unvoiced "g" sound seems to give Americans trouble. I've seen "tounge" (for "tongue") online more times than I can count, though unlike "longue" I haven't heard "tongue" pronounced to rhyme with "lounge."

[mike]

@rootlesscosmo, I imagine that that's because the -gue spelling is so non-phonetic. There's an interesting post on the DailyWritingTips blog that lists a bunch of words that end in -gue; they're virtually all pronounced just as "g":

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/words-ending-in-gue/

Note the amusing aside: "WARNING: These words start to look strange when you look at them in a group." Indeed they do.

The post also notes that many such words (e.g., "analogue," "dialogue") now have variant spellings that reflect their actual pronunciation ("analog," "dialog").

That doesn't explain how "longue" became "lounge," exactly. That might be a case where an existing English word was close enough in meaning that people naturally started using it; a kind of folk-etymological/eggcorn-y kind of transformation.

In any event, in the absence of any formal spelling reform in English, spelling changes will occur spontaneously, and it's not surprising that this would be likeliest with words where the spelling corresponds so little to a pronunciation.

[Nick]

Thank you so much! I never did know what to call that thing.I think we called it a "pool chair" or "lounger".On the box it also explains that Barbie is a ,"Teen-age fashion model". I knew she wasn't just some "doll". And the notice," clothing not included".I love it. I suppose Barbie was toasting her buns by the pool. And why the two drinks?

[John Russell]

Interestingly, in the UK, I've never heard anyone say 'shays lounge'. The 'worst' pronunciation I've ever heard is 'shays long'. In fact, if I ever heard anyone in the UK say 'shays lounge' I'd have no hesitation -- for their own enlightenment, you understand -- in correcting them.

I put the tendency of the US to change both the spelling and pronunciation of words down to the historically high proportion of their population who spoke English as their second language. Could this give Americans the tendency to be much more cavalier with words and to make them feel that mangling was totally acceptable?

At one time -- say up to the '70s -- the British were always taught the importance of 'speaking properly'. Since the huge influx of non English-speaking foreigners from our former colonies, starting in the '60s, this has reduced dramatically as teachers became encouraged to 'embrace difference'. This has happened to such an extent now that some indigenous white 'yoof' now say 'aks' instead of 'ask'; and are not corrected by their teachers.

How times change, innit.

[Ben Zimmer]

"Chaise lounge" was added to the OED in its September 2007 update, with citations back to 1807. See Patricia O'Conner's Grammarphobia blog for more.

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2009/08/in-the-longue-run.html

[Jessica]

Although I'm a Francophile/-phone and usually happy to toss around French phrases at the drop of a ... chapeau, in this case I'm happy to ditch chaise longue in favor of lounge chair or lounger, both of which communicate the item more clearly.