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Sande
wrote:
>the word petty applied to bourgeois is a misnomer. it is
actually petit or
>petite (mainly because I can't remember the gender of
bourgeois). over time,
>it
became bastardized, like most of American language.
Well, "petty bourgeois" is pronounced almost exactly like "petit
bourgeois."
In
French usage, a "petit bourgeois" would be opposed to a "grand bourgeois."
Grands bourgeois are people like the Drexels or the Pughs or the
Annenbergs: enormously wealthy captains of finance and industry. According
to the original sense, everybody now in University City is petty bourgeois
(there are a few grands bourgeois squirreled away amongst us, perhaps picking up
a degree at Penn, or slumming as an artist in Garden Court, but they tend to be
discreet by nature). As far as housing is concerned, they tore down all the
grands-bourgeois mansions and left only the petty stuff behind -- that's
the substance of our Historic Non-District.
But times change.
Nowadays, "petty bourgeois" is apt to mean "someone who is middle class, but
whom I, although also middle-class, feel socially superior to."
Another definition might be "someone who is middle class, but who doesn't
know or throw around terms like 'petty bourgeois' much." In that sense,
University City is anything but petty bourgeois.
-- Tony
West
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