Bougie

"There, as my lord, with achromatic glass, / "O'erlooks St. James's Park, and on the grass, / "Beneath his mansion's half-closed window spies / "Two crouching urchins' gross obscenities, / "He turns his eager gaze, adjusts the screw, / "And brings their unwashed nudities in view. / "That spot, concealed by two o'er hanging hills, / "Foul sweat and fœtid excrement distils, / "Yet frowsy, there the pipe-clayed soldier sports, / "And bishops hold episcopalian courts. / "'Tis there the Bath empiric's finger guides, / "The oiled bougie ; and as the dildo slides / "Besmeared, to meet last night's descending meal, / "Oft makes the strictures he pretends to heal.

2001, Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Alfred A. Knopf (2001), 12, I was not too sure, as a child, what doctors "did," and glimpses of catheters and bougies in their kidney dishes, retractors and speculums, rubber gloves, catgut thread, and forecepts - all this, I think, rather frightened me, though it fascinated me too.

Hey, look, man, I haven't changed, I'm not gonna change and I'm not down with this bougie stuff.

Called “bougie” when she was growing up, even though she’d never considered herself close to that, Ewing has turned the word around, using it as the title of a fictitious magazine she has dreamed up.

I'll be on the movie screens / Magazines and bougie scenes

Shangela is kind of bougie, but she's also your homegirl.

I don't need you or your brand new Benz / Or your bougie friends

Bougie attitude, I'm from the West End / I want the finer things in life

Sure, you can go to a bougie bakery and purchase an artisanal sourdough without any additives that will cost much more and taste better than a supermarket loaf. But ultimately, bread is made from flour, salt, water and yeast.

But if the mix is no longer about life's essentials, and instead a new wave of chichi cafés, artisan bakers and fancy nail bars—are we right to ask, not how useful is your high street, but how bougie?