Let me introduce you to the chicest linguistic chicanery… what? No, not the choicest. The chicest.
No, it doesn’t rhyme with nicest. It’s the superlative of chicer.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, most chic.
Yes, chicest looks weird, but how would you spell it? Thanks to the orthographic chicanes and etymological chicanery (or vice versa) of the English language, we have a word that phonologically is eminently amenable to addition of the superlative suffix but in written form seems to have had something shaved off, resulting in an obstacle to comprehension.
Well, we’re the ones to blame here. Swiping French chic into English is like swindling something from a luxury store just because it’s more expensive when you could have had the same thing readily enough from someplace cheap. Yes, yes, French is chic, all fashionably set out and all that, but German simply has good arrangement and tasteful presentation – or, as the Germans say, Schick.
Of course Schick may seem a word for ‘neatly shaven’, because, after all, it’s a brand of razor. But it’s also the German word for tidy arrangement et cetera, formed from the verb schicken, ‘arrange, outfit, dispatch’ (related to other Germanic words meaning ‘happen’ and ‘hurry’). And, as far as we can tell, Schick is the origin of chic.
But there could be some trickery, some deception, some misleading arrangement. After all, schicken may also be the origin of French chicane.* And chicane refers to deception or subterfuge, at first especially in legal matters but also over time in other kinds of subtlety and trickery. In English it also has the same sense (but a different pronunciation, one that sounds like it’s been too close to cocaine), plus some derived senses, notably a hand that has no trumps in a game of bridge, and a section of a race course that has a double curve.
Which is funny, when you consider that in matters legal and financial, a chicane involves pulling a fast one, while in racing (cars, bobsleds, etc.), a chicane exists specifically to slow racers down. You think you’re going one way, then you suddenly have to change direction, and then you have to change back to the original direction.
Which is sort of like what happens with chicest. After all, it’s a French word that combines with an English suffix and manages to look like both French and English and also neither. But it would probably be even worse if we tried to spell it any other way. Chickest? Obviously not. Cheekest? Ha. Sheekest? It would sound right, but it would look so wrong. Chiquest? I mean, yeah, that’s as close as you might get, but it still has its hazards. And anyway it would look like it came from French chique, which refers to a flea or a lump of tobacco, both of which come from Spanish chico ‘small’. Which somehow is not related to chic.
Well, anyway. I think our language has some cheek coming up with a chicane like chicest. But if you’re wondering what I do, well, I’m sorry to say that while I will say “chicest” (“sheekest”) out loud, I’ll write it as most chic – I’ll chicken out.
* Are you surprised to see German words becoming French words? It’s true that French is not descended from German, but it’s also true that Germany and France are neighbours and that before the Romans came to France it was full of Germanic and Celtic speakers, so there has been some swerving of words between them.
Sesquiotica 