You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. In 1759, a new head of the Treasury was installed in France and he had this daunting job of trying to rein in a

spiraling deficit under the King Louis 15th and so he imposed all these

austerity measures he cut state pensions he taxed luxury items, including doors and windows,

he taxed Bachelorhood itself, and he ended public funding for the King's gambling losses.

Well, all of this penny- penny pinching made him really unpopular.

And in fact when people were doing things on the cheap they would use his name.

His name was Etienne de Silhouette, and they would say,

I'm doing something Allah Silouette, that is on the cheap, you know,

kind of shoddy.

And his name also gave us the word that we have in English

for a dark outline of someone or something

against a light background, silhouette.

There was a fashion during that time for making those kinds of portraits of people, just an outline of somebody against a light

background because of course that's a whole lot cheaper than trying to hire somebody to paint a painting.

And so his name, Silhouette, became associated with this cheap way of

depicting people. That's amazing. I wonder what he would think if he were alive today

and knew that his name was still a verb, still a noun,

used across languages around the world.

That's amazing.

I know, isn't it?

I should add that he only lasted eight months in office.

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