Pylimitics

"Simplicity" rearranged


Recherché

A word you find once in a while — it seems to be falling in popularity — is recherché. If you want to point out that something is rare, refined, and sought out with great care, while simultaneously implying that you yourself are refined and elegant (and quite possibly a bit pretentious), you’d describe the thing as recherché. 

Recherché is French, which I guess is fairly obvious (in modern American English, putting an accent over a vowel is generally taken to mean ‘hey dude, this might be French’), where it’s simply “researched”. 

The word has been used to great effect in literature, where it’s been used by writers from Mark Twain (in Innocents Abroad, for example) to G.K. Chesterton to Bill Nye. So go search it out; recherché is quite recherché.



About Me

I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated puppy Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel.