COQUELUCHE, n. Once, a long time ago in my first year of grad school, I was attending a social event hosted by the teaching assistants’ union, mingling with other new students. A science grad student looked at me in perplexity when I said that my PhD would be in French. He said, “But what kind of research can you do in French? Do you discover new words?”
I had to disappoint him. The French language, spoken by about 275 million people worldwide, is not uncharted territory. Besides, my doctoral dissertation was about literature, not linguistics. (The idea of doing research on literature was even more confusing to that poor scientist, but let’s not get into that.) So no, my career as a humanist was not about discovering new words.
But my life as a human? Hell yeah I discover new words.
Not the way scientists discover new elements—those weird ones at the end of the periodic table that only exist for fractions of a second—or new planets or new species. Things nobody has ever seen before. In order for me to discover a word, somebody has to have invented it first. And then a whole lot of people have to say it or write it down (sometimes over many hundreds or thousands of years) so it’ll be in a dictionary, or at the very least my search results, when I look it up. The words I discover are only new to me. Plenty of other people know them already; that’s how words work.
Still, it doesn’t diminish the pleasure of coming across a new one. The great thing about languages is that even in your native one there will always be words you don’t know, or words you know but don’t know-know, and if you learn a new language, the pool of unknown words expands, as does the possibility that you’ll run into beautiful cross-cultural hilarity like this:
"C'est quoi Gritty?"
November 7th 2020 875 Retweets 2,781 Likes
The screenshot in the tweet is text from the Le Monde liveblog of the US election (did you know there was an election this week?), where journalists were answering reader questions, and in English it says:
YOUR QUESTIONS
What’s Gritty?
—Babette
Good evening Babette,
If you’re asking the question, it’s probably because you heard about, or better yet saw, this ball of orange hair, who is none other than the mascot of NHL team the Philadelphia Flyers. As the Marc-Olivier Bherer article below explains, Gritty became the icon of the antifascist movement and is ubiquitous on social media and at anti-Trump protests. And today many people in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania where the results of the ballot count could be decisive in the race for the White House, lost no time in dressing up as Gritty to support Joe Biden.
To be American is to be continually ashamed that not only does your country do so much evil, but also the whole rest of the world is forced to watch in horror. But not this time. Le Monde explaining Gritty is way, way less embarrassing to me than Le Monde or any other foreign news outlet explaining the fucking electoral college.
Le Monde gives a pretty solid explanation for a fairly opaque cultural phenomenon. How did we get from this (Gritty’s first official tweet)
to this?
Or this?
Or to bring it back to French, this:
Liberté, Egalité, Gritté
November 6th 2020 8,894 Retweets 30,177 Likes
I don’t have the answer to the question of “why Gritty”—it’s probably because he’s both terrifying and weirdly lovable, and also fundamentally chaotic, but I don’t have a degree in grittisme—so let’s talk about the other best part of this Le Monde citation.
It’s the word “coqueluche” in the French.
In this context, referring to Gritty as a beloved leftist symbol, “coqueluche” has to be translated by its informal usage “icon, idol, pin-up, heartthrob,” as opposed to its other meaning, which is “whooping cough.”
Wait, what?
Yes, “la coqueluche” is also the French word for pertussis, or whooping cough, and it comes from Old French word meaning “hood” (capuche), which the Trésor de la langue française says is likely because having whooping cough makes your head feel hot and heavy as if you were wearing a hood or perhaps people infected with whooping cough wore hoods to stay warm. I also saw some places on the internet offer the explanation that medieval doctors wore hoods to protect themselves from pertussis, but I can’t find any real confirmation of that, and more importantly my many searches have only produced one image of what such headgear might have looked like, and that’s a real bummer.
So the life cycle of this word so far is: hood → whooping cough → ??? → heartthrob. And actually, those arrows are probably giving the wrong impression, because we don’t know for sure that the “heartthrob” meaning even comes from the whooping cough one. The TLF says “orig. obsc.” Wiktionary says it’s maybe related to “coquetterie,” as in flirtatious behavior, but I hate to gainsay the TLF.
But if “coqueluche” as in heartthrob does come from “coqueluche” as in whooping cough, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time humans have associated feelings of sickness and love:
So anyway, US leftists have a fever for Gritty, and we all discover new words all the time.
Here’s Heather Schwedel at Slate talking about “gleefreshing” as the opposite of doomscrolling.
And Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch noting another synonym:
Also, I meant to talk about this in the newsletter weeks ago, but historian Rachel Hope Cleves published an article about 19th-century sex slang related to food in both French and English, and it’s fabulous (you need journal access to read it, unless your really good friend/internet stranger whose newsletter you read slips you a PDF, ahem):
The glossary contains a lot of real puzzles like “gauffrière (waffle iron): the female pudendum”—I mean, I sort of get the idea, but also I don’t want to stick my hand in a waffle iron, you know?—and is a delight to read.
Did I read any books this week? lolllllllll
But I did finish a lot of books last week that I didn’t have a chance to mention, so here’s some small-r romance that I read before this week arrived and I couldn’t relinquish my death grip on my phone:
Thrall (gay m/bi m, lesbian f/bi f, all cis, contemporary) by Roan Parrish and Avon Gale. I picked up this contemporary retelling of Dracula, set in New Orleans and told in chat and true-crime podcast transcripts, because it was on sale around Halloween and it was such a fun read. It’s been a long time since I read the original Dracula, but we all know in our hearts that all vampires are queer, so it’s nice to see this retelling make good on that promise. It’s a different take on vampirism than the original, but still spooky. Content warnings: sex, discussion of murders, online death threats, missing family member.
Nine Years of Silver (cis gay m/non-human gay? m, fantasy, novella) by Parker Foye. I was in the mood for haunted, atmospheric queer stuff and this delivered. A bounty hunter returns to his hometown on the trail of a killer and needs the help of his childhood love to solve the case. Only his childhood love is maybe sort of also a murderer, and not entirely human, at that. Also, I love the idea of mining for secrets. Content warnings: murder, violence, mentions of abuse, descriptions of drowning.
Hart of Winter (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy) by Parker Foye. This is another Parker Foye book, this one with more of a cozy winter-holiday vibe, and it’s about a guy who is just trying to celebrate Solstice in a ski chalet in France and not think too hard about the curse that’s going to turn him into a stag some day. Luckily there’s a hot reality-show cursebreaker in town. This is super cute. Content warnings: sex.
The Faerie Hounds of York (m/m, both gay and cis, historical, fantasy, novella) by Arden Powell. Another spooky queer read, this one about how to get out of bargains with the fae (you can’t), and falling in love when you know you’re gonna die (the only way any of us can). Lots of scratching at windows and distant howling in this one. A+ suspense. Content warnings: self-harm and suicidal ideation, mentions of racism and homophobia.
Hammer & Tongs (bi masculine-of-center f/bi cis m, historical, novella) by Lara Kinsey. This book stars a dapper farrier and a submissive crime boss and remains the only romance I have read where the loving description of bare forearms was not about a cis man. They bang in the stables. It’s a good time. Content warnings: sex. Also, there is a moment of “recognition” that calls back to the classic histrom woman-in-pants trope that might be uncomfortable for trans and/or nonbinary readers.
You give me fever.
See you next Sunday!
