I have been told by a friend that there is a French word that means "pretty ugly." That is: a word to describe a person (such as a woman) who is so seemingly unttractive that she is beautiful. Can anyone help me out?
I don't have an answer, but since you posted this on the Learning and Knowledge forum, thought I'd post this.
quote:The subject of semantic or dominant isotopies in texts can be analyzed further in the relationship between a category and its opposite. Linguists early discovered that binary oppositions somehow governed texts. An example could be the common opposition between 'beautiful' and 'ugly'. However, this opposition differs from the mere contradiction of 'beautiful' vs. 'not beautiful'. If a person is said to be not beautiful, he or she does not have to be ugly, but you cannot say that someone is not beautiful and beautiful at the same time. The assessment 'not beautiful' presupposes beautiful. It is also implied that someone deemed ugly is also not beautiful. Similarly, to be not ugly is not the same as being beautiful although by implication a person who is deemed beautiful is also not ugly. Greimas collected these relations of contradictions and oppositions5 in the semiotic square: The semiotic square Following this figure the meaning of 'beautiful' is presupposed in its oppsition to 'ugly', its contradiction to 'not beautiful' and by being a complement to 'not ugly'. ~ from “Latour - semiotics and science studies” By Roar Høstaker, Associate Professor, Lillehammer University College http://ansatte.hil.no/roarh/artiklar/latouroggreimas.htm
And from: Die Götzen-Dämmerung - Twilight of the Idols Friedrich Nietzsche [ 1895 ] SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN 19. Beautiful and ugly ["fair and foul"]. -- Nothing is more conditional--or, let us say, narrower--than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would think of it apart from man's joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. "Beautiful in itself" is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty--and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty--alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty. At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment "beautiful" is the vanity of his species. For a little suspicion may whisper this question into the skeptic's ear: Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that man should be the model of beauty. Who knows what he looks like in the eyes of a higher judge of beauty? Daring perhaps? Perhaps even amusing? Perhaps a little arbitrary? "O Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull me by my ears?" Ariadne once asked her philosophic lover during one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. "I find a kind of humor in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not even longer?" 20. Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man--and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something "ugly." His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride--all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of "ugly." Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition--even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol--all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, "ugly." A hatred is aroused--but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness--it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep. http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html "The notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena is based on two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects and events with meaning, and hence signs; and second, that they do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations." ~ Jonathan Culler, "Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature"
Where's Makepeace when you need her? Our resident Francaise.
You probably don't mean 'Oxymoron', but here's a definition anyway from Wikipedia: An oxymoron (plural "oxymora") (noun) is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms (e.g. "anarchy rules". "living dead"). Oxymoron is a Greek term derived from the adjectives oxys ("sharp, keen") and moros ("blunt, dull"). Oxymora are a proper subset of the expressions called contradiction in terms. What distinguishes oxymora from other paradoxes and contradictions is that they are used intentionally, for rhetorical effect, and the contradiction is only apparent, as the combination of terms provides a novel expression of some concept.
The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective/noun combination.
It's true meaning is a woman who is not attractive, but still has a certain magnetism that attracts a person anyways.
'Wisdom comes to all of us. Someday it might even be your turn.' -Polgara the Sorceress "To the pain!" Dread Pirate Roberts "People are stupid" Wizard's First Rule
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Thanks, eap@^^@, for clearing this up. "belle laide"
quote:A...French idiom, une belle laide (a beautiful ugly one), refers to a woman who is not attractive in the conventional sense but whose charm transcends the easy gratification of perfect regularity. Among famous people [an] example...is the actress Giulietta Masina, star of 1986's Ginger and Fred,...and the wife of director Federico Fellini. Masina was short. Her figure was nothing special, her face squarish, her lips thin. But her eyes were wonderfully sweet and expressive. James Barrie wrote of charm, "If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have." http://www.snyderman-works.com/snyderman/artists/painting/bliss/review2.html
quote:Miss Boyd was thirty. Her busy life had not caused the years to pass easily, and she looked older. But she was one of those plain women whose plainness does not matter. A gallant Frenchman had to her face called her a belle laide, and, far from denying the justness of his observation, she had been almost flattered. Her mouth was large, and she had little round bright eyes. Her skin was colourless and much disfigured by freckles. Her nose was long and thin. But her face was so kindly, her vivacity so attractive, that no one after ten minutes thought of her ugliness. You noticed then that her hair, though sprinkled with white, was pretty, and that her figure was exceedingly neat. She had good hands, very white and admirably formed, which she waved continually in the fervour of her gesticulation. Now that her means were adequate she took great pains with her dress, and her clothes, though they cost much more than she could afford, were always beautiful. Her taste was so great, her tact so sure, that she was able to make the most of herself. She was determined that if people called her ugly they should be forced in the same breath to confess that she was perfectly gowned. Susie's talent for dress was remarkable, and it was due to her influence that Margaret was arrayed always in the latest mode. The girl's taste inclined to be artistic, and her sense of colour was apt to run away with her discretion. Except for the display of Susie's firmness, she would scarcely have resisted her desire to wear nondescript garments of violent hue. But the older woman expressed herself with decision. ~ excerpt from The Magician by William Somerset Maugham http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.1/bookid.2992/sec.2/
[This message was edited by thenostromo on 01-12-06 at 04:56 PM.]
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