More Etymology
A real one, this time: A little while back, Peter Schjedalhl had a piece on William Eggleston at the Whitney in the New Yorker. It was, like a lot of Schjedal's essays, filled with precious phrases like this one:
The OED defines it, "Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable." But in an even more fascinating way, it comes from the French louche (somewhere in the beginning of the 19th century), meaning squinting. That word, in turn, comes from the Latin lusca, the feminine version of luscus, meaning one-eyed.
Of course.
An installation in the show, “Stranded in Canton” (circa 1973-74), screens excerpts from thirty hours of black-and-white videotape, some of which he shot using an infrared camera in dim light. The subject amounts to a louche, peripatetic Southern spawn of Andy Warhol’s dissipated Factory scene of the mid-sixties. Acquaintances of the photographer, drunk and/or drugged more often than not, hilariously rant, casually empty a pistol into a ceiling, bite the heads off live chickens (see it, believe it), and otherwise parade lives of unquiet desperation.The word that struck me was louche.
The OED defines it, "Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable." But in an even more fascinating way, it comes from the French louche (somewhere in the beginning of the 19th century), meaning squinting. That word, in turn, comes from the Latin lusca, the feminine version of luscus, meaning one-eyed.
Of course.
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