Louche and Louching

The other day, I was lying in bed, sipping a Campari, when it occurred to me to wonder where the word louche came from. I imagined that it had something to do with luxury, and fell back to sleep. Which didn't help the Campari.

I was very wrong, because louche means cross-eyed. Or it did once. To be precise there was a Latin word luscus, which meant one-eyed. The feminine was lusca, from which the French got lousche, which meant cross-eyed or squinting. And then louche.

Louche came into English in 1819, but it didn't mean what it means now. It had nothing to do with Camparis in bed. Instead it meant oblique, asquint, Not Straight-Forward. So the first usage is:

There is some~thing louche about him, which does not accord with the abandon of careless, intimate intercourse.

(Intercourse didn't mean what it does now either, lest you misunderstand Wordsworth's "The dreary intercourse of daily life").

For a good century, it seems louche kept its French meaning, but added to it the idea of being opaque, unclear and therefore dishonest. Only slowly, very slowly did it start to mean raffish, rakish, dissolute and bedbound Campari. This is recent enough, that the OED still doesn't mention that meaning.

But there is another meaning of louche, and this I didn't know at all until I was checking all this up. Louche can be a verb.

I don't know if you drink much pastis. Or ouzo? Or raki? Or absinthe? Or anything flavoured with aniseed. If you do, you should know of the strange thing that happens when you add water, for the beautiful clear liquid suddenly turns cloudy, and milky, and opaque. This is known as louching.

It can be known as the ouzo effect, but louching is a much better word, and it allows you to louchely louche your louche drink.

Next time it won't be Campari.


By the way, another term for louching is "spontaneous emulsification", which reminds me of this song, because I really don't think he does know what emulsified means.