Bougie Slang: How Did 'Bourgeoisie' Become a Bad Word?

The original meaning of bourgeois is from the French word bourg, which means a small market town or walled settlement. Back in the Middle Ages, the bourgeois were the people who lived in these country towns.

Since town folk were one economic step up from farming peasants, the bourgeois were the first to have middle-class status.

By the 17th century, bourgeois had taken on a new, more critical connotation. The French playwright Moliere, for example, wrote a musical comedy in 1670 called "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" or "The Bourgeois Gentleman" that pokes fun at a naive, middle-class social climber who hires tutors and fashion consultants to fit into high-class society.

By the 19th century, bourgeois had migrated from snarky social commentary to the center of a radical political movement.

In 1848, Karl Marx published "The Communist Manifesto," which laid out the German philosopher's revolutionary economic worldview. Marx believed that capitalist, industrial societies were engaged in a class war. The heroes were the proletariat (the working class), while the villains were the bourgeoisie, the higher-class capitalists who "owned the means of production."

Since Marx was writing in German, he used the phrase "bürgerliche Gesellschaft," which was alternately translated to English as "civil society" or "bourgeois society."

In either case, the accusation was the same: that the bourgeoisie ripped off the proletariat by getting rich off their labor. The bourgeoisie were the bad guys and had to be toppled.

When Marxist ideas crossed the Atlantic in the early 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), better known as the "Wobblies," picked up the plight of the proletariat.

Americans can't resist mangling a foreign word. As journalists Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman report on their blog Grammarphobia, the Wobblies coined "bushwa" as slang for "bourgeois." O'Conner and Kellerman quote a 1970 article describing the Wobbly worldview back in the early 1900s:

But what's even more fun, O'Conner and Kellerman report, is that the derisive tone of "bushwa" quickly slipped into the common lexicon as a PG version of "bulls----." They quote the "Random House Dictionary of American Slang," which found the first such usage in a 1906 issue of the National Police Gazette:

Black popular culture has been remixing its own version of bourgeois, at least since Gladys Knight & The Pips recorded their 1980 disco hit, "Bourgie, Bourgie" (pronounced "boo-jee, boojee"). The song describes a person "from across the tracks" who flaunts their new money with fancy clothes and a shiny car with a sunroof.

Whether you spell "bougie" as "bourgie" or "boujee," the 21st-century slang word has flipped back to a definition Moliere would recognize. It's used to playfully throw shade on upwardly mobile people with upper-middle-class tastes.

But sometimes the intent behind the slang word is less playful and more derisive, accusing the subject of being pretentious.

There's also "boujee," as popularized in Migos' hit hip-hop song "Bad and Bouje," which proudly flaunts newly acquired wealth and a fancy lifestyle — similar to what the Pips were teasing in the 1980s. The video shows well-heeled ladies wearing designer clothes, drinking champagne and eating out of Chanel fast-food containers.

In modern France, being bourgeois doesn't mean you have pedestrian tastes. In fact, it's the opposite.

According to Camille Chevalier-Karfis, a native Parisian who teaches classes on French language and culture, being bourgeois is all about effortless style, good manners, good education and maybe a country house to escape the city on the weekends.

The flashy nemesis of the French bourgeois is the "nouveau riche," who vulgarly flaunt their wealth and status through a lavish lifestyle.

Chevalier-Karfis notes there are three kinds of bourgeois:

All three categories, she assures us, follow the same codes of the bourgeois.