Abougie is a bourgeois individual, someone who is comfortable in the middle class and proud of his achievements. Sarah Elton used the word in this newspaper in a June 3 article about Toronto's Dufferin Mall, which is scheduled to receive an upscale fashion shop as a new tenant. "Gasp," Elton wrote. "Could this mean the Duff is going bougie?" Reader Susan Peters, who noticed the word and says she had heard it used by a Nova Scotian friend, writes: "Is this a new word, a regionalism, or just something I haven't heard of before?"
Bougie, with a soft g as in bourgeois or the s in leisure, dates at least from the mid-20th century in this sense, and has been variously spelled boojee, boochie and buzhie. All indications are that it was born in black American slang to describe someone, particularly another black person, who was seen to be too eager to improve his or her lot in life. English is full of such expressions, transcending skin colour: putting on airs, rising above one's station, hoity-toity. The phenomenon is nicely covered in the expression tall-poppy syndrome, which describes the egalitarian, envious or spiteful (take your pick) demand that any poppy that grows too high above the rest be cut back.
Jill Nelson used bougie in The Washington Post in 1987. She said her parents were "once dismissed by me as 'bougie' because they had the self-interest and stamina to become professionals." In The Chicago Tribune in 1992, Janita Poe wrote about Jack and Jill of America Inc., a social organization for black children, and quoted this comment by 16-year-old Natalie McNeal: "To someone on the outside, they may think, 'Oh, they're trying to be bougie (bourgeois) black folks.' But I don't think that's true at all."
In most such uses, the word is dismissive, as in Mary Otto's piece for the Knight-Ridder News Service in 1996. "She believes he has become bourgeois," Otto wrote. " 'He's a bougie, elitist black man,' [the Rev. Imagene] Stewart said." A 1999 issue of Time magazine defined bougie, in black slang, as "being socially pretentious." In the same year, Nick Carter, writing in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the movie Trippin', said bougie referred in part to the relationship in black culture between those with lighter and darker skin. He spoke of "the bourgeois or 'bougie' strain, as it's sometimes called by black writers and academics, with its projection and promotion of the black middle class through characters who frequently lack the melanin and black verbal cadence of their counterparts, the 'Bamas.' 'Bamas' are meant to convey an African-American model that's usually darker in tone and more 'street' or Southern in vernacular. It's a crude myth, but one widely held in today's pop culture."
As Elton's use in these pages indicated, the word has taken on a more general sense as shorthand for bourgeois, though still with the cocked eyebrow of mild censure. Pierre Amanda used it that way in The Des Moines Register on Feb. 20 of this year: "Although he now sees it as a petty 'bougie' (bourgeois) attitude, the pain of losing his luxe life made Fodor desperate."
Bourgeois comes (by way of French) from the late Latin burgus, meaning castle, which similarly lies at the root of burg (as in Louisburg), burgher and borough. But not all bougies arrived by that path. The Algerian town of Bougie (Bijiyah in Arabic), which was prominent in the wax trade, gave its name to the bougie, a wax candle. That in turn provided the name of the bougie, the medical rod or tube used to dilate the body's orifices; the instrument is thinner at the probing end than at the holding end, much as a candle is thicker at the base.
In Paris, young professionals who like to live in poor but vibrant neighbourhoods while sending their children to better schools elsewhere are referred to as bobos -- bourgeois bohemians. It's theoretically possible that when they leave the house, they become bougies -- bouger being French for moving from one spot to another. And if they join the French Foreign Legion, they become Beau Geste.