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Word-watchers like Miss Poubelle track the rise and fall of vocabulary items the way bird-watchers meticulously plot the life course of the tufted titmouse. The emergence of a new word causes the same sort of excitement among the lexicographically inclined as the discovery of a new species does among the ornithologists.

No less exciting is the discovery that a word which was once a rara avis is on its way to becoming as common as a sparrow. So Miss Poubelle has been intrigued by the recent emergence of the word louche, a rare and exotic specimen, which seems to be on this year's vocabulary A-list.

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Louche is a borrowing from French. It is derived from the Latin lusca "one-eyed," and in modern French it means something like "shady," "suspicious," or "dubious." The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "oblique, not straightforward" and notes that it is rare and not fully assimilated into English. A web search turns up scarcely any uses of the word in English, and that confirms that it is indeed quite rare.

But a recent issue of The New Yorker uses the word twice. It appears once in a discussion of the NBA strike, where Adam Gopnik notes that the labor dispute uses the language of classic union-management conflicts despite the fact that neither the players nor the owners could be considered working-class or hard up. Gopnik writes "...the confrontational vocabulary of the century's agonized first half is continually misapplied to its louche and swoony end."

Another use of the word comes in a discussion of the investigation of Clinton, where Joe Klein writes "The subsequent investigations by Kenneth Starr's prosecutorial team... uncovered poor judgment (and in the Lewinsky case, spectacularly louche behavior) on the President's part."

Miss Poubelle can only speculate as to the reasons behind The New Yorker's sudden fondness for louche, but she does note that Gopnik is the magazine's correspondent from France. Whatever the reason, louche seems to be the word of the moment.

But what will the latest incarnation of louche mean? Miss Poubelle detects a departure from the dictionary definition in these latest citations. It seems unlikely that anyone would describe Clinton's behavior with Lewinsky as "oblique" or "not straightforward"-- if anything, their behavior with each other seems to have been too straightforward. And I doubt that when Gopnik describes this century's end as louche he intends to say that it is "oblique." Nor does either author seem to intend the word strictly in its French sense. The end of the century isn't really suspicious or dubious, and neither was the extramarital canoodling on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Instead, the meaning of louche that seems to be emerging is something like "scandalous" or "dissipated," implying that the person or thing so described has fallen away some prior state of moral rigor. And in that sense, louche may have a special significance for us. For we know too well that the moral rigor and pretended Puritanism so widely evident in our country are no friends to the gay and lesbian community. Our own behavior has been described as scandalous and dissipated long enough to make us suspicious of those who set up the standards for judgment.

Miss Poubelle predicts that some right-wing logophile like William F. Buckley or William Safire will use the word to describe us in the next few months. And at that point we'll have two choices: we can either fight it, or try to subvert it. The second option seems like more fun-- we're pretty close to using up the word gay anyway, and queer hasn't quite made it. So how about "louche liberation"? **