Exquisite (pronounced ek-skwi-zit or ik-skwiz-it)
(1) Of special beauty or charm, or rare and
appealing excellence and often associated with objects or great delicacy; of
rare excellence of production or execution, as works of art or workmanship; beautiful,
delicate, discriminating, perfect.
(2) Extraordinarily fine or admirable;
consummate.
(3) Intense; acute, or keen, as pleasure or
pain; keenly or delicately sensitive or responsive; exceeding; extreme; in a
bad or a good sense (eg as exquisite pleasure or exquisite pain).
(4) Recherché; far-fetched; abstruse (a now
rare early meaning which to some extent survives in surrealist’s exercise “exquisite
corpse”).
(5) Of particular refinement or elegance,
as taste, manners, etc or persons.
(6) A man excessively concerned about
clothes, grooming etc; a dandy or coxcomb.
(7) Ingeniously devised or thought out
(obsolete).
(8) Carefully adjusted; precise; accurate;
exact (now less common except as an adverb.
(9) Of delicate perception or close and
accurate discrimination; not easy to satisfy; exact; fastidious (related to the
sense of “exquisite judgment, taste, or discernment”.
1400–1450: From the Late Middle English
exquisite (carefully selected), from the Latin exquīsītus (excellent; meticulous, chosen with care (and literally “carefully
sought out”)), perfect passive participle of exquīrō (to seek out), originally the past participle of exquīrere (to ask about, examine) the
construct being ex- + -quīrere, a combining form of quaerere (to seek). The construct of exquīrō was ex- + quaerō (seek). The ex-
prefix was applied to words in Middle English borrowed
from the Middle French and was derived from the Latin ex- (out of, from) and was from the primitive Indo-European eǵ-
& eǵs-. It was cognate with the Ancient Greek ἐξ
(ex-, out of, from) from the
Transalpine Gaulish ex- (out), the
Old Irish ess- (out), the Old Church
Slavonic изъ (izŭ) (out), the Russian
из (iz) (from, out of). Exquisite is a noun & adjective,
exquisiteness is a noun and exquisitely an adverb; the noun plural is exquisites.
The etymology of the Latin quaerō (seek) is mysterious. It may be from the Proto-Italic kwaizeō, from the primitive
Indo-European kweh (to acquire) so
cognates may include the Ancient Greek πέπαμαι (pépamai) (to get, acquire), the Old Prussian quoi (I/you want)
& quāits (desire), the Lithuanian
kviẽsti (to invite) and possibly the
Albanian kam (I have). Some have suggested the source being the
primitive Indo-European kwoys & kweys (to see) but there has been little
support for this. The authoritative Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben
(Lexicon of the Indo-European Verbs (LIV)), the standard etymological
dictionary of the Proto-Indo-European languages, suggests it’s a derivation of hzeys (to seek, ask), via the form koaiseo. "Exquisite corpse" is a calque of the French
cadavre exquis (literally “exquisite cadaver”). Dating from 1925, it was coined by French surrealists
to describe a method of loosely structured constructivism on the model of the
parlour game consequences; fragments
of text (or images) are created by different people according to pre-set rules,
then joined together to create a complete text.
The name comes from the first instance in 1925: Le cadavre exquis boira
le vin nouveau (The exquisite corpse will drink new wine). Exquisite corpse is noted as a precursor to
both post-modernism and deconstructionist techniques.
Although not infrequently it appears in the
same sentence as the word “unique”, exquisite can be more nuanced, the comparative
“more exquisite, the superlative most exquisite” and there has certainly been a
change in the pattern of use. In
English, it originally was applied to any thing (good or bad, art or torture, diseases
or good health), brought to a highly wrought condition, tending among the more
puritanical to disapprobation. The common
modern meaning (of consummate and delightful excellence) dates from the late
1570s while the noun (a dandy, a foppish man) seems first to have been used in
1819. One interesting variant which didn’t
survive was exquisitous (not natural,
but procured by art), appearing in dictionaries in the early eighteenth
centuries but not since. The
pronunciation of exquisite has undergone a rapid change from ek-skwi-zit to ik-skwiz-it, the stress shifting to the second syllable. The newer pronunciation attracted the
inevitable criticism but is now the most common form on both sides of the
Atlantic and use seems not differentiated by class.
An exquisite: Baldur Benedikt von
Schirach (1907–1974)
Exquisite is used almost exclusively as an
adjective, applied typically to objects or performances but it’s also a noun,
albeit one always rare. As a noun it was
used to describe men who inhabited that grey area of being well dressed, well coiffured,
well mannered and somewhat effeminate; it was a way of hinting at something
without descending to the explicit. PG
Wodehouse (1881-1975) applied it thus in Sam
the Sudden (1925) and historians Ann (1938-2021) & John Tusa (b 1936) in
The Nuremberg Trial (1983) found no
better word to apply to Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, noting his
all-white bedroom and propensity to pen bad poetry. The companion word to describe a similar chap
without of necessity the same hint of effeminacy is “aesthete”.
Nazis at the Berghof: Adolf Hitler, Martin
Bormann, Hermann Göring, and Baldur von Schirach, Berchtesgaden, Bavaria,
Germany, 1936. All were guilty as sin but von Schirach would survive to die in his bed at 67.
Convicted by the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT, 1945-1946) for crimes against humanity, von
Schirach received a twenty year sentence escaping conviction for his role as
Nazi Party youth leader and head of the Hitlerjugend
(Hitler Youth) between 1931-1940 (though he was a good deal more guilty
than Socrates in corrupting the minds of youth), the sentence imposed for his
part in deporting Viennese Jews to the death camps while Gauleiter (district party leader) and Reichsstatthalter (Governor) of Vienna (1940-1945). Had subsequently discovered evidence against
him been available at the trial, doubtlessly he’d have been hanged.
Exquisite: A style guide
Lindsay Lohan in a Gucci Porcelain Garden
Print Silk Gown with an all-over Dutch toile in blue and white, high ruffled
collar and bib, flared sleeves, pussy bow and a blue and red patent leather belt
around a high waist, Savoy Hotel, London, June 2017. The gown was said to have a recommended
retail price (RRP) of Stg£4,040 (US$7300).
The occasion was the launch of the charitable organization One Family, dedicated to combating child
trafficking.
Within the one critique, the word exquisite
can appear, used as a neutral descriptor (an expression of extent), a paean to
beauty and even an ironic dismissal. A
gown for example can be “exquisitely detailed” but that doesn’t of necessity
imply elegance although that would be the case of something said to be an “exquisite
design”. That said, most were drawn to
the gown in some way, the references to Jane Austin many (although historians
of fashion might note Gucci’s creation as something evocative more of recent
films made of Jane Austin novels that anything representative of what was worn
in her era) and the fabric’s patterning & restraint in the use of color produced
a dreamily romantic look.