épater le bourgeois

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English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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Borrowed from French épater le bourgeois (amaze the bourgeois).

Verb

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épater le bourgeois

  1. (literary) To scandalize, provoke the middle class.
    • 1987, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students:
      All that was needed were the heroes willing to act out the fantasies the public now accepted as reality: the hero, as hedonist, who dares to do in public what the public wants to see. It was épater les bourgeois as a bourgeois calling.