Habitué

Habitué (pronounced huh-bich-oo-ey or huh-a-bee-twey (French))

(1) A frequent or habitual visitor to a place.

(2) Casual term for someone so bone-idle they stay in bed long after the hour most decent folk arise.

(3) A person thought (or self-described as) especially competent to pass critical judgments in an art, particularly one of the fine arts, or in matters of taste.

1818: An English borrowing from the French habitué (to frequent), noun use of masculine past participle of habituer (accustom), from the Late Latin habituāre (to bring into a condition or habit of the body; to habituate), from habitus (condition, appearance, dress), originally the past participle of habers (to have, hold, possess; wear; find oneself, be situated; consider, think, reason, have in mind; manage, keep), from the primitive Indo-European ghabh- (to give or receive) and later the perfect passive participle of habeō (have)); the plural form is habitués.

Never assimilated into English

Borrowed from the Modern French, habitué is ultimately a fork of the Late Latin habeo (have) which was productive in many European languages.  It entered the Proto-Italic as habēō or haβēō although the latter may come from a primitive Indo-European word meaning “to grab, to take”; it’s related also to the Old Irish gaibid (to take, hold) and the Polish gabać (to grab, snatch).  Despite the similarity in both form and meaning, the English “have” is not a cognate, related instead to the Latin capiō (to take).  Some of the oldest attestations are the works of Plautus (circa 254-184 BC) and the Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BC). The Umbrian cognate hab- exists in the Iguvine Tablets (oldest of the third century BC tablets) and the Oscan cognate haf- is in the Tabula Bantina (89 BC).

Habitué illustrates the conventions of English which operates to define whether foreign words in common use are absorbed or remain alien.  Habitually the adverb and habitual the verb are both commonly used English words spelled in conventional English phonetics.  Habitué is spelled with an accented é (accent acute) and a correct pronunciation depends on following the French rule; it’s thus still a foreign word used in English enough to avoid obsolescence yet not sufficiently for either spelling or pronunciation further to have been anglicized.

Another re-boot.  Shoe shop habitué Lindsay Lohan assesses the heel &  sole.

At one end of the market, habitué is used by some to describe patrons of high-priced shops, art galleries, the opera et al when they feel a word like “customer” might be thought a bit common.  At the other end, it’s a favorite of police prosecutors, who, enjoying the juxtaposition of language, describe someone who not infrequently enjoys the services of prostitutes as “a habitué of brothels”.