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Lauren Vogelbaum here.

The word bourgeois has gone through some serious twists and tumbles in its time.

Although Americans tend to think of everything French as fancy and high class, the French

definition of bourgeois has ranged from everything from decidedly basic to effortlessly

stylish. Today, let's look at how this term and various slang around it, like Bougy, came to be.

The English language started borrowing Bougoir from the French sometime in the 1500s.

The French developed the word earlier during medieval times from the old French word Bour,

meaning a market town or settlement. It's from the same route

where we get the burg in city names, like Pittsburgh, or the word borough. Anyway, a bourgeois was a

person who lived in a town. The plural was bourgeoisie. Though technically anyone living in these blooming urban environments was a bourgeois, the term was usually only applied to craftspeople, merchants, landowners, and the like.

People who were an economic step up from farmers and other manual laborers, but a step down from the noble aristocrats.

The bourgeois Z were people who had middle-class status.

The word bourgeois expanded to become not just a noun for one of these folks, but also an adjective

describing someone with certain middle-class traits or behaviors, and not necessarily

in a positive way. In the 1670s, the famous French playwright-Moyer wrote a musical comedy

called, in translation, The Bougoir Gentleman, which pokes fun at a guy who's this naive,-class social climber who hires tutors and fashion

consultants to try to fit in to high-class society.

Bouchoir was not a term one would apply to oneself.

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