The word is French, it means the grandest room in a great house, and America gave it to a shed with a piano in it
The Red Dog Saloon holds a 4.4 from two thousand and twenty-eight people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and does American barbecue.
And the word saloon is one of the great linguistic demotions in English.
Salon
A salon is the reception room of a great house – the grand one, the one you show people into.
And in eighteenth-century France it became something more: the salon was a gathering, hosted by a woman, in her own drawing room, at which writers and philosophers and politicians talked.
The salons of Paris were, in a genuine sense, the engine of the Enlightenment. They were where ideas were tested. They were run by women, at a time when women were excluded from every formal institution, and they were the only place where that conversation could happen.
The word crossed to England, and it kept its dignity.
And then it went west
In America, a saloon is a bar.
And not a grand one – the saloon of the American frontier was a wooden building with a plank counter, sawdust, and whiskey of a quality that does not bear examination.
The swinging doors, incidentally, are largely a film invention. Real saloons had proper doors, because it gets extremely cold in Wyoming.
So a word that meant the drawing room of a chateau came to mean a shed on a dirt street with a man playing an upright piano badly.
And it came home
Which is the part that closes the loop.
The saloon bar in a British pub is the good room – the one with a carpet, the one that costs more for the same beer, the one separated from the public bar by etched glass so that the classes could not see each other drink.
We wrote about that at the Argyll Arms, two hundred metres from here, which still has its snob screens – and at the Prince Alfred, which still has all five compartments and five separate doors.
So in Britain the word kept its snobbery. In America it lost it entirely. And they are the same word.
The Institute for Linguistic Drift in Erith has assessed the corpus and reports that saloon is the only word in five postcodes to have travelled from a palace to a shed and back to a carpet.
The food
Low and slow, over hardwood – and we explained the chemistry at Garden Bar and Smokehouse: collagen breaks down into gelatin over many hours, and that is the whole of it, and it cannot be hurried.
Verdict
Good barbecue, honest price, and a name that has been all the way down and halfway back.
The salon hostesses
Who ought to be better known and who were doing something genuinely radical.
A salonniere chose who came. She controlled the conversation, set the subject, and ended it when it turned nasty – and she did all of this in an era when women were excluded from every university, every academy and every parliament in Europe.
Which means that a very large amount of Enlightenment thought was tested, first, in a room run by a woman who was not permitted to publish under her own name.
The men wrote it down. The men are remembered.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
