A Commonplace Book

   When you said "bourgeois" in the nineteenth century, you were letting irritation show. It was the word for people you disliked, who were inferior to you but not inferior enough. So "bourgeois" came to mean all that Matthew Arnold meant by "philistine," and more. It became an all-purpose slur.

   Like the tree toad and the swamp adder, the "bourgeois" is named for his habitat, the "bourg"; he's an urban irritant, like the traffic jam. Whether affluent or threadbare, hearty or pale, he institutionalizes mediocrity. The satisfactions he craves, erotic or aesthetic, will be above all undemanding, reassuring. He's inseparable from his high collar, and his life is the reverse of free and easy. Constipation clogs his mind; also his shoes pinch, and (Gustave Flaubert observed) his consummation is a hat so little distinct from ten thousand other hats it might get swapped at the office had he not thought to write his name inside it.