Silhouette

I spelled ‘silhouette’ correctly first try just now, and I am irrationally proud of myself.

You don’t care about that though. What you do care about is that the word ‘silhouette’ comes from the 1700s French minister of finance named Étienne de Silhouette.¹ We don’t know why his name turned into a term, though speculation suggests distaste for his policies or commentary on his short tenure in office.

As for me, I’m just in shock.

I’m quite torn on whether I want the same to happen to me. I just imagine ‘foos’ entering common parlance, and then 300 years later some random guy trying to figure out why and getting really annoyed that it inexplicably resulted from some guy named Patrick.

Footnotes

1. imagine if he had been named Frank Silhouette lol ↩