Cul-de-Sac
Pardon My French
Pirates loved lairs. The hideouts they liked best, moreover, sat at the far ends of long, narrow coves– features which discourage pursuit, or, at the very least, force the warships chasing them to move in single file.
In the middle years of the seventeenth century, French-speaking pirates, whether Boucaniers or Flibustiers, would often refer to a natural fortress of this kind as a ‘bottom of a bag’ (cul de sac). In the same era, their landlubbing cousins used the same term to describe a dead-end street.
In the century that followed, blind alleys of this sort came to characterize the geography of Paris. Indeed, in 1752, the anonymous author of a catalogue of the walkways of that city described his gazetteer as an Alphabetical Table of All of the Streets, Cul-de-Sacs, Passages, Quays, Bridges, and Public Squares, et cetera, of the City of Paris and its Suburbs.
The proliferation of cul-de-sacs proved a great boon to people who liked to LARP the barricade scenes from Les Misérables. As a result, Napoleon III (who reigned from 1852 until 1870) replaced the rabbit warren of ramshackle tenements and shadowy side streets that surrounded his palace with stately, grey-roofed apartment buildings, broad boulevards, and the gas-fired lanterns that turned Paris into the ‘city of lights’.
This grand exercise in urban renewal deprived cul-de-sac of most of the work that it had done for a good two hundred years. As a result, it would, for the century that followed, keep itself in circulation with odd jobs of various sorts. Every once in a while, it provided people writing about the great outdoors with a name for valleys that sported but a single entrance. It also found work handbooks of anatomy, where it described ducts and bulbs and other structures that resembled the blind alleys of old-time municipalities.
Marvelous to say, the medics distinguished their culs de sac from those of pirates and Parisians by the way they formed the plural form of the expression. While most folks placed the ‘s’ at the end of sac, those who sawed bones for a living put it after the ‘l’ in cul. (You can remember this by thinking of the surgeons general and physicians-in-chief who write culs de sac.)
In the 1950s, the builders of American suburbs rescued cul de sac from chronic underemployment. Indeed, that expression has become so familiar to folks in the English-speaking world that I have yet to encounter an Anglophone who attempts to approximate its original pronunciation. Thus, some will say ‘cull dee sack’. Others will say ‘cool dah sack’. But no one who grew up chez les Anglo-Saxons says ‘coo duh sac’.
Sources
Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix Histoire de l’Isle Espagnole ou de S. Domingue (Paris: François Barois, 1731) Tome II page 26 (Hathi)
Table Alphabetique de Toutes les Rues, Cul-de-Sacs, Passages, Quais, Ponts, Places Publiques, et Cetera de la Ville & Fauxbourgs de Paris (Paris: De Bure l’Ainé, 1752) (Gallica)
For Further Reading
