Bougie. Maybe you’ve been called it for exclusively shopping at Whole Foods or drinking absurd amounts of rosé. Maybe you’ve hurled it as an insult at a friend who can’t shut up about her new Anastasia Beverly Hills highlighter. Maybe you’ve been listening to rap group Migos’ chart-topper Bad and Boujee on repeat.
But what does the term actually mean, and where did it come from in the first place?
The 'bougie' backstory
Well, even though it might seem so 2017, the term bougie actually has a 100-year history (and multiple spellings) dating back to revolutionary France, before stemming off into variations of the slang word we know and love today.
So bougie, boujee, bourgie all stem from bourgeoisie, a French word that simply means "of middle-class status."
But over time, the adjective form, bourgeois, came to be a more generic description of middle/upper-middle-class materialism.
Bougie today
The most recent iteration of bourgeois is "bougie" or "boujee," used to describe high-end tastes like driving your Prius to get avocado toast after SoulCycle.
It’s an equal-opportunity jab at anyone from hipsters and the coastal elite to the suburban or basic. The "boujee" variation (used by Migos in Bad and Boujee) commonly refers to middle-class or upwardly mobile black people.
Urban Dictionary’s top entry for bougie defines it thus:
“Aspiring to be a higher class than one is. Derived from bourgeois - meaning middle/upper class, traditionally despised by communists.”
So in modern-day English, someone who is bougie is creating an air of wealth or upper-class status — whether it's true or not.
Source: USA Today
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