Milieu

Milieu (pronounced mil-yoo, meel-yoo or mee-lyœ (French))

Surroundings, medium, environment. especially of a social or cultural nature.

1795-1805: From the twelfth century French milieu (middle, medium, mean (literally "middle place)) from the Old French as meillieu, mileu and miliu, from the Latin medius, from the primitive Indo-European root medhyo (middle) + lieu (place).  The French was derived from the Latin words medius (middle) and locus (place).  The rarely used plural forms of the noun are milieus (English) and milieux (French).  The construct of the French: mi- (mid) +‎ lieu (place) mirrors the sense of the word.

English speakers have used milieu for the environment or setting of something since the early-1800s but other "lieu" descendants are older: lieu itself and lieutenant since the fourteenth century.  By the late-1800s, milieu had become a fashionable word among scholars and writers.

In the milieu of the industrial baroque, Lohan Nightclub, Iera Odos 30-32 | Kerameikos, Athens 104 35, Greece.

In the twentieth century, milieu was adopted by the emerging discipline of sociology as a technical term.  C Wright Mills contrasted the immediate milieu of an individual’s life with the over-arching social, political and economic structure, highlighting the distinction between "the personal troubles of milieu" and the "public crises of social structure".  Emile Durkheim didn’t entirely disagree but seemed so fond of the word he described the big structures as the milieu social, asserting it contained internalized expectations and representations of social forces and social facts which, he argued, existed only in the imaginations of individuals as collective representations.  Phenomenologists, structuralists at heart, built two models: society as a deterministic constraint (milieu) or a nurturing shell.