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• piquant •

Pronunciation: pi-kahnt, (US) pi-kwênt • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: 1. Having a sharply pleasant flavor, tart, pungent. 2. Strikingly stimulating to the mind.

Notes: Although this word is generally associated with tastes and smells (piquant sauces), anything pleasantly sharp in the figurative sense can be said to be piquant (piquant wit). It comes with a noun, piquancy, and an adverb, piquantly. Pique is a distant cousin, sharing a Latin source, but "sharp" in a different sense.

In Play: First, an example with the literal meaning of the word: "I didn't realize just how piquant Madeleine's salad dressing was until I arrived home and tried to go to sleep." It may also be used metaphorically: meaning No. 2 above: "I am made aware of just how much I miss the piquant voice of Eartha Kitt every time I hear "C'est si bon" sung by someone else."

Word History: Today's Good Word was taken letter-for-letter from French, where it meant "pricking" or "prickly", from piquer "to jab, prick, irritate". We assume it came from some Vulgar Latin word, piccare "to prick, pierce", but we have no written proof of the existence of such a word. This word is possible since it might have been derived from picus "woodpecker" or some predecessor of picus. Pique, pike and pick in the sense of "pickax" come from the same French source. All Romance languages have a derivation of this mysterious Latin word: French pique, Italian picca, Portuguese pique, Spanish pica. Latin must have contained a word other than picus based on pic- meaning "spear, pike" or otherwise referring to something with a point. (We always appreciate the piquant words recommended by Mark Bailey such as today's Good Word.)

"Piquant" is a savory word...mixing pleasure with the pungent, it has a delicious mix of associations. It is a word of very sophisticated and complex duty: compare it to the rather straightforward approach of its cousin "pungent," a great word, but one that carries little nuance.

I always am taken aback by the slightly dissonant sound of "piquant", but then I usually decide that the harsh and tricky pronunciation is appropriate for a word simultaneously connoting pleasure and sharpness. Contrast that satisfyingly appropriate dissonance with "pulchritude" an unabashedly ugly sounding word which oddly means "beauty."

There is an excellent and quite unexpected use of the word "piquant" in the dialogue of the BBC series "The Fall." This highly intelligent police drama, set in contemporary Belfast, was a two season project that failed to get the attention it deserved for the quality of the acting, writing, casting, cinematography and plotting. When released, the series was eclipsed by other, less cerebral cable series--like Orange is the New Black-- that consumed all the headlines. But "The Fall" is readily available now for streaming from NetFlix. Because the context is too complicated to explain in a short post, and because I do not wish to reveal any plot details, I'll say only that there is a prodigy of vocabulary choice when the protagonist Paul Spector uses the word "piquant" in the final episode. One devastating line of dialog summed up eleven episodes.

Thanks, I will check it out on Netflix.

Piquant is related to the Mexican word picante. What would life be without picante sauce to liven it up. In Texas we have a salad called pico de gallo, an Anglicized picotazo del gallo, meaning the peck of the rooster. This is also related to our English word piquant.

Texas is a world all to itself (in a good way).

A Cajun chef cooked for a church one time producing his signature dish, sauce picquant, accent on last syllable and pronounced -ahnt including the T. Typically not sure how many would show up, I asked him what we would do if there were too many. His answer was also picquant: "Add mo peppah."