Short Stuff: Bourgeoisie

Bourgeoisie is more than a word. It means something different depending on when and where it's being used. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:39Josh Clark?

  Hello and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. So it's short stuff, you basic person.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  You calling me bougie?

• 0:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah. No, I'm not. I wouldn't do that. I think it's kind of a mean thing to say to somebody, at least in America. In France, they're like, yes, you're right. Thank you. In America, it's a bit of a put down.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  That's right. And that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about a word, bourgeois, B-O-U-R-G-E-O-I-S.

• 1:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Not to be confused with bourgeoisie, correct?

• 1:21Josh Clark?

  Well, yeah, they're very closely related. Bourgeois can mean a, it can be an adjective and a noun.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:28Josh Clark?

  If it's a noun, you're talking about one person who is bourgeois. So that's their behavior or it's the one person. Bourgeoisie is all of the people who are bourgeois. It's a noun only. Okay, everybody, there's going to be a quiz at the end of this episode.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  But if you, if you talk to Americans, a lot of Americans probably hear bourgeois and they think, oh, fancy, fancy, fancy.

• 1:51Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  And that is not the case because bourgeois refers to, like you called me, basics or sort of a middle-class, basic individual.

• 1:59Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Or group of individuals.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Right. But there's a, um, there's a long road between the original version of bourgeois that we'll talk about and then the, the American version that it has now. And right smack dab in the middle are the commies, specifically Karl Marx.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22Josh Clark?

  I don't understand why Joseph Engels never gets his due because he and Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, but it's always just Karl Marx, Karl Marx, you know, must drive Engels crazy. But in 1848, they published the Communist Manifesto. And in that, they adopted the word that had formerly been middle-class people. It wasn't really much of a put-down. It wasn't, it was just a useful word for a while. He equated them with the people who owned the capital that the labor was produced on and decided that they were exploiting the proletariat, the working class, right?

• 3:00Speaker 03

  That's right. And he was writing in German, so of course he did not say bourgeois. He said, "Bürgerliche Gesellschaft."

• 3:08Josh Clark?

  Oh, beautiful.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  And English-

• 3:10Josh Clark?

  You make German sound beautiful, Chuck.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Thank you. Danke. In America, they may translate that as civil society or maybe a bourgeois society. But either way you slice it, what he's saying is the bourgeoisie are, are the bad people.

• 3:25Josh Clark?

  They're the one, they're exploitive. They're not actually doing anything. They just own the stuff that the people who are actually doing something are using to do the thing that they're doing. But really, the bourgeoisie are the ones who are making the money off the working class in their labor, right? So it was not, it was not, at this, at this time, it was not viewed as a very popular or, um, it wasn't, it wasn't praise. How about that? No one ever used it for praise by this time. And when it finally crossed the Atlantic to America around the early 20th century, the Wobblies, the industrial workers of the world, uh, who were, I believe- We talked about them before and they were split between communists and anarchists.

• 4:09Josh Clark?

  And there was a big struggle, I think, between the two, but regardless of whether you're a communist or an anarchist at the beginning of the 20th century, you were not a fan of the bourgeoisie. And yeah, so the wobblies did not like the bourgeoisie either, and they in fact came up with a new slang term for them.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  That's right. The slang word was buschwa, B-U-S-H-W-A. And what's weird, I think that was in a quote from a 1970 article. What's weird, though, is that that word, buschwa, eventually was sort of morphed into a slang for BS, like somebody's full of hot air or BS, someone, you know, was full of buschwa.

• 4:53Josh Clark?

  Right. We have to thank our friends at the Grammarphobia blog for digging that stuff up.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 5:00Josh Clark?

  And then, so it also kind of morphed in a new way, kind of the way that we view it today, but a little, yeah, I guess it was pretty much the way we view it today. It first pops up in black culture where it kind of morphed, thanks to Gladys Knight and the Pips. They had a disco hit in 1980 called Bougie Bougie.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Can we hear a snippet?

• 5:25Josh Clark?

  No, we can't, unfortunately, but if you want to hear any of the song Bougie Bougie, you can find it on YouTube or just about anywhere, where you can listen to it free and clear. But it's a great song and I strongly recommend people go listen to it.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that would be B-O-U-R-G-I-E, comma, B-O-U-R-G-I-E.

• 5:45Josh Clark?

  Right. And the whole, the whole point of the song is it's about somebody who comes from the working class or a poorer background, but started to make money and now they're flaunting it. They have like a new car with a sunroof, they have new clothes, and it was a, it was a commentary on them, but also kind of like a snide one too, like, like these, these people are being tacky in a way and forgetting who they are, where they come from, I guess.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is kind of like that, that new money, old money thing, which is just so, bleh, you know?

• 6:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I say we take a break, Chuck.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Yes, I was about to say that. Nice work.

• 6:40Speaker 03

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• 7:43Josh Clark?

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• 8:05Josh Clark?

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• 8:43Speaker 03

  So if you want to go back to the original bougie, if you want to go back to France, the original meaning is from a French word B O U R G, which I guess would that be bourg?

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, kind of like berg on the end of a town.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Okay. And that's like a small town or a small market. In the Middle Ages, the people that lived there sort of adopted that name for themselves. So it kind of, this word is just morphing and morphing all over the place over the years. They were one step up from like a farming peasant, so they were sort of the middle class of the time.

• 9:28Josh Clark?

  Right. Which is just the way that it was. Again, I said it was like a useful word. It wasn't like a put down, it wasn't like a compliment, it was like you are bourgeois. That's that.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, descriptor.

• 9:40Josh Clark?

  Right. Very nice. And it wasn't until the 17th century, specifically, I think in 1670, when Moliere, the French playwright, came up with a musical comedy, he was hilarious, called La Bourgeois Gentel- Gentelum, or The Bourgeois Gentleman. And this is when it takes bourgeois and makes fun of it. Moliere was punching down to the middle class and essentially doing the exact same thing that Gladys Knight and the Pips are doing with bougie bougie. He was basically making fun of some middle-class social climber who was trying to make a name for himself in French society.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  That's right. And that would be the definition that is most sort of thought of today in the 21st century, when someone says bougie. Another, you know, modern musical example is Atlanta's own. From the ATL, Migos. You ever listen to Migos?

• 10:39Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  It's good stuff. They have a song called Bad and Bougie, in this case spelled B-O-U-J-E. And it sort of leans back on that, what the pips were talking about. Sort of a new fancy lifestyle.

• 10:53Josh Clark?

  Yes, but two, two things were different. One, the Migos made their money cooking crack in a crock pot, which is a proprietary eponym. And usually there was an Uzi in the same room, too. And two, they were proud of being bougie and all the new money and tacky like ways that they threw it around. Like, that was the thing. It wasn't, it wasn't a put down. They were like, yeah, I'm bougie. You should have seen the money I had before, and now look what I got.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 11:21Josh Clark?

  It's a great song.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:24Josh Clark?

  Okay, so that's where we are today. Bougie, it's, it's essentially a put down depending on whether you've claimed it yourself. If, most of the time, if you're calling someone bougie in America, you're basically saying, like you said at the outset, they're basic, their, their lifestyle and their life is just kind of boring and pedestrian, the middle of the road, and what's the point kind of thing. Usually it's from somebody who, well, they're just being mean essentially, right?

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:54Josh Clark?

  But in France, it's not the case.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, in modern France, it does not mean pedestrian.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  It's a little more like good, well-mannered, well-educated. There's, there's like three levels supposedly of a Parisian bourgeois. The, the nobility, or people that are kind of close to nobility, or the rich, or the crème de la crème. You have the bourgeois de province, doctors, attorneys, middle-class types. And then the petite bourgeois, who are, you know, shopkeepers, artists, you know, kind of self-starting, self-employed people.

• 12:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and even though there seems to be a bit of a hierarchy to it, they all are, they're behaving the same way. I think it just depends on how much money you have is what, what is really kind of carved out between. But the bourgeois in France is exactly what Americans who don't know what bourgeois means think of. They're correct, but they're just thinking specifically of the French bourgeois.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:59Josh Clark?

  And yeah, I guess that's about it for being bougie and bourgeois and bourgeoisie and Karl Marx and Joseph Engels and Migos and Gladys Knight and the whole lot of it, Chuck.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Well, we'll follow up in 10 years and see if the definition's changed again.

• 13:14Josh Clark?

  Great idea. In the meantime, short stuff is out.

• 13:20Speaker 04

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