Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
Speaker 1: there's chalk and Jerry's sitting in for Dave. So it's
Speaker 1: short stuff. You basic person.
Speaker 2: You calling me bougie?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no not. I wouldn't do that. I think it's
Speaker 1: kind of a mean thing to say to somebody, at
Speaker 1: least in America. In France, they're like, yes, you're right,
Speaker 1: thank you. In America, it's a bit of a put down.
Speaker 3: That's right. And that's what we're talking about today, where
Speaker 3: you're talking about a word bourgeois. B oh you r
Speaker 3: G E O I s. Yeah, not to be confused
Speaker 3: with bourgeoisie.
Speaker 1: Correct, Well, yeah, they're very closely related. Bourgeois can mean
Speaker 1: a It can be an adjective and a noun. Right,
Speaker 1: If it's a nown, you're talking about one person who
Speaker 1: is bourgeois. So that's their behavior where it's the one
Speaker 1: person bourgeoisie as all of the people who are bourgeois.
Speaker 1: It's a noun only, okay, everybody. There's gonna be a
Speaker 1: quiz at the end of this episode.
Speaker 3: But if you if you talk to Americans, a lot
Speaker 3: of Americans probably hear bourgeois and they think, oh, fancy
Speaker 3: fancy fancy, right, And that is not the case because
Speaker 3: bourgeois refers to like you called me, basics or sort
Speaker 3: of a middle class basic individual, yes, or group of individuals.
Speaker 1: Right. But there's a there's a long road between the
Speaker 1: original version of bourgeois that we'll talk about and then
Speaker 1: the American version that it has now and right, smack
Speaker 1: dab in the middle are the commis, specifically Karl Marx.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why Joseph Engles never gets his due
Speaker 1: because he and Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. But it's
Speaker 1: always just Karl Marx. Karl Marx, you know, must drive
Speaker 1: angles crazy. But in eighteen forty eight they published the
Speaker 1: Communist Manifesto, and in that they adopted the word that
Speaker 1: had formerly been middle class people. It wasn't really much
Speaker 1: of a put down, it wasn't. It was just a
Speaker 1: useful word for a while. He equated them with the
Speaker 1: people who owned the capital that the labor was produced on,
Speaker 1: and decided that they were exploiting the proletariat, the working class. Right,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 3: And he was writing in German, so of course he
Speaker 3: did not say bourgeois. He said bergiar lche Gesellschaft and English.
Speaker 1: Make sureman sound beautiful, Chuck, thank.
Speaker 2: You, Donka.
Speaker 3: In America they may translate that as sybil society or
Speaker 3: maybe a bourgeois society. But either way you slice it,
Speaker 3: what he's saying is the bourgeoisie are are the bad people.
Speaker 1: They're the one they're exploitive, They're not actually doing anything.
Speaker 1: They just own the stuff that the people are actually
Speaker 1: doing something or using to do the thing that they're doing.
Speaker 1: But really the bourgeoisie are the ones who are making
Speaker 1: the money off the working class in their labor right.
Speaker 1: So it was not it was not at this at
Speaker 1: this time, it was not viewed as a very popular
Speaker 1: or it wasn't it wasn't praise. How about that no
Speaker 1: one ever used it for praise by this time and
Speaker 1: when it finally crossed the Atlantic to America around the
Speaker 1: early twentieth century, the wobbles the industrial workers of the
Speaker 1: world who were I believe we talked about them before,
Speaker 1: and they were split between communists and anarchists, and there
Speaker 1: was a big struggle I think between the two. But
Speaker 1: regardless of whether you're a communist or an anarchists, at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the twentieth century. You were not a
Speaker 1: fan of the bourgeoisie. And yeah, so the Wobbleys did
Speaker 1: not like the bourgeoisie either, and then in fact came
Speaker 1: up with a new slang term for him.
Speaker 3: That's right. The slang word was boushois bushwa. And what's weird?
Speaker 3: I think that was an a quote from a nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy article. What's weird, though, is that that word boushwa
Speaker 3: eventually was sort of morphed into a slang for bs,
Speaker 3: like somebody's full of hot air, or bs someone you
Speaker 3: know is full of bushwi.
Speaker 1: Right, we have to thank our friends at the Grammarphobia
Speaker 1: blog for digging that stuff up.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: And then so it also kind of morphed in a
Speaker 1: new way, kind of the way that we view it today.
Speaker 1: But a little yeah, I guess it was pretty much
Speaker 1: the way we view it today. It first pops up
Speaker 1: in black culture, where it kind of morphed thanks to
Speaker 1: Gladys Knight and the Pips. They had a disco hit
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty called Bougie Bougie.
Speaker 3: And can we hear a snippet?
Speaker 1: No, we can't, unfortunately, but if you want to hear
Speaker 1: any of the song Boogie Bougie. You can find it
Speaker 1: on YouTube or just about anywhere where you can listen
Speaker 1: to it free and clear. But it's a great song
Speaker 1: and I strongly recommend people go listen to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that would be be o u r g
Speaker 3: I E comma b o u r g i.
Speaker 1: E right, and the whole the whole point of the
Speaker 1: song is it's about somebody who comes from the working
Speaker 1: class or a poorer background but started to make money
Speaker 1: and now they're flaunting it. They have like a new
Speaker 1: car with the sun roof, they have new clothes, and
Speaker 1: it was a it was a commentary on them, but
Speaker 1: also kind of like a snide one too, like like
Speaker 1: these these people are being tacky in a way and
Speaker 1: forgetting who they are where they come from.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah, it's kind of like that that new
Speaker 3: money old money thing, which is just so.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I say we take a break, chuck.
Speaker 3: Yes, I was.
Speaker 2: About to say that nice.
Speaker 3: Softly, jaw.
Speaker 1: Soft.
Speaker 3: So if you want to go back to the original bougie,
Speaker 3: if you want to go back to France. The original
Speaker 3: meaning is from a French word b o u r g,
Speaker 3: which I guess would that be Bourg.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of like berg on the end of a town.
Speaker 3: Okay, and that's like a small town or a small
Speaker 3: market in the Middle Ages. The people that live there
Speaker 3: sort of adopted that name for themselves, so it kind
Speaker 3: of this this word is just morphing and morphing all
Speaker 3: over the place over the years. They were one step
Speaker 3: up from like a farming peasant, so they were sort
Speaker 3: of the middle class of the.
Speaker 1: Time, right, which is just the way that it was.
Speaker 1: Again I said, it was like a useful word. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like a put down. It wasn't like a compliment.
Speaker 1: It was like you are bourgeois. That's that's that descriptor right,
Speaker 1: very nice. And it wasn't until the seventeenth century, specifically,
Speaker 1: I think in sixteen seventy when Moliere, the French playwright,
Speaker 1: came up with a musical comedy he was hilarious called
Speaker 1: Le Bourgeois gentle Gentleumes or the bourgeois Gentleman. And this
Speaker 1: is when it takes bourgeois and makes fun of it.
Speaker 1: It's Moliere was punching down to the middle class and
Speaker 1: essentially doing the exact same thing that Gladys Knight and
Speaker 1: the Pips are doing with bougie bougie they he was
Speaker 1: basically making fun of some middle class social climber who
Speaker 1: was trying to make a name for himself in French society.
Speaker 3: That's right, and that would be the definition that is
Speaker 3: most sort of thought of today in the twenty first
Speaker 3: century when someone says bougie. Another modern musical example is
Speaker 3: Atlanta's own from the atl Migos. You ever listen to Migos, Oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's good stuff. They have a song called bad and
Speaker 3: Bougie in this case spelled b o u j e,
Speaker 3: and it sort of leans back on that what the
Speaker 3: Pips we're talking about? Sort of a new fancy lifestyle.
Speaker 1: Yes, but two things were different. One the Migos made
Speaker 1: their money cooking crack in a crock pot, which is
Speaker 1: a proprietary eponym, and usually there was a oozy in
Speaker 1: the same room too. And two they were proud of
Speaker 1: being bougie and all the new money and tacky like
Speaker 1: ways that they threw it around like that was the thing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. It wasn't a put down. They were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm bougie. You should have seen the money I had before,
Speaker 1: and now look what I got.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: It is a great song. Yeah, okay, so that's where
Speaker 1: we are today. Bougie it's it's essentially a put down,
Speaker 1: depending on whether you've claimed it yourself. If most of
Speaker 1: the time, if you're calling someone bougie in America, you're
Speaker 1: basically saying, like you said at the outset, they're basic,
Speaker 1: They're They're lifestyle in their life is just kind of
Speaker 1: boring and pedestrian, the middle of the road and what's
Speaker 1: the point kind of thing. Usually it's from somebody who well,
Speaker 1: they're just being mean essentially, right, Yeah, but in France
Speaker 1: it's not the case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in modern France, it does not mean pedestrian. It's
Speaker 3: a little more like good, well mannered, well educated. There's
Speaker 3: there's like three levels supposedly of a Parisian bourgeois, the
Speaker 3: nobility or people that are kind of close to nobility,
Speaker 3: or the rich or the crime de la creme. You
Speaker 3: have the bourgeois de provence, doctors, attorneys, middle class types,
Speaker 3: and then the petite bourgeois who are you know, shopkeepers, artists,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of self starting, self employed people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and even though there seems to be a bit
Speaker 1: of a hierarchy, to it. They all are. They're behaving
Speaker 1: the same way. I think it just depends on how
Speaker 1: much money you have, is what it's really kind of
Speaker 1: carved out between. But the bourgeois in France is exactly
Speaker 1: what Americans who don't know what bourgeois means think of.
Speaker 1: They're correct, but they're just thinking specifically of the French bourgeois.
Speaker 1: Yeah and yeah, I guess that's about it for being
Speaker 1: bougie and bourgeois and bourgeoisie and Karl Marx and Joseph
Speaker 1: Engels and Migo's and Gladys Knight and the whole lot
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 3: Chuck, Well, we'll follow up in ten years and see
Speaker 3: if the definition's changed again.
Speaker 1: Great idea. In the meantime, Short Stuff is out. Stuff
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