Today's word is
bête noire
Okay, so here's the thing: Dictionary.com shows this French phrase as the word of the day, but not with the little hat -- the accent circumflex -- over the first "e" in "bête." Aptly enough, this irritates me no end.
I realize that this is a French phrase commonly used in English, but, sorry, it's still French.
According to Proust, if I remember correctly -- and please understand that this brief passage out of his entire oeuvre is not only the only bit of his work that I ever enjoyed but also the only instruction in French etymology besides what was obvious from having also taken high school Latin that I ever received in several years of study including a summer at the Sorbonne, and please also understand that I read this brief passage just about twenty years ago this month while feeling suicidal in Alaska -- according to the Proust in my most ironically fading memory, when the Romans invaded omnia Gallia, the Gauls were not overjoyed by subsequent arrangements including the suffocation of their own native language in favor of the tongue of the conquerers. There wasn't a lot they could do, but one passive-aggressive little protest was, per Proust's professor character as I remember him, a refusal to learn to spell Latin correctly.
Many of the French spellings and constructions that so aggravate American schoolchildren who start to wish mid-first-semester that they'd taken Spanish instead, and the preservation of which is fiercely protected by L'Académie française, are actually corruptions of Latin, possibly deliberate, often going back to the time of Julius Caesar. Deliberate or not, diacritical marks such as the circumflex almost always indicate a missing letter, often a missing "s." For example, the word "château" meaning "castle" is from the Latin word "castello." And the word "bête" meaning "beast" is from the Latin word "bestia."
I understand that language is fluid, and that all things corrupt, and that trying to hold on too tightly to any facet of it or getting one's knickers in a twist over the petty changes wrought day to day by whatever defines contemporary culture right now is a foolish expenditure of emotion indicative usually of a pervasive fear of and sadness over one's own mortality, aloneness, and ultimate cosmic unimportance. I do get that.
Nevertheless, look how much is lost when we relinquish the circumflex.
And please pardon me if I don't.
If you yourself want to use a lowercase circumflex "e" and don't know how to type it, hold down the "alt" key and press 0234 on your Windows keyboard. For the capital, hold down the "alt" key and press 0202.
And perhaps, if I am not meanwhile devoured by beasts or time itself, I shall return later with a poem using the phrase "bête noire." And I hope you will, too.
*****
Tuesday, 10:44 p.m.
Through the glades of gold
I hurtle in my silver carriage
straight into the embrace
of you, my bête noire.
I know your name but will not say it.
I will take your gifts in spite of myself,
snatching them from your claws
even as you rake them across my heart.
No, I take that back.
They are not gifts; they are too hard won.
I will take them as prizes.
I will take them as tribute.
I float to you through all these leaves
as in a dream,
and I speak boldly now
of how things will be,
but later, after I have left you
in my history,
after you are something
I dared to let happen
to me once, again,
I will think of you,
shiver, wince,
and be grateful you are
over.
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