So, I was finishing the estimable novel Eat the Document, by the talented Dana Spiotta, and I spied this phrase: "...the most beautiful, white, elegant-but-brisant smoke trails." Boom! Brisant. An explosive word, a brilliantly crackling word, a French-Celtic conveyor of fragmentation, fire, and force. And "brisant" is so apt in this book's context, since it is a novel of Sixties radicalism involving the never-ending shards of an antiwar bombing (yes, I concede that can be considered an oxymoronic term).
Hey, reader, watch out for verbal collateral damage. Me personally, I want to insouciantly work the word "brisant" into my coffee shop conversation today, as any good boulevardier or flaneur should. (Excuse my French. [I rather dislike that phrase to mask obscenity; just say the fecking word].)
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