Flâneur is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male “stroller”, stereotypically of Paris. What a delightful word!

I’ve been intrigued by the term métis for some time. At the root, the word is French for “mixed”, as in “mixed race”. About twenty years ago, I was in France and actually overhead the word used “in the wild” in this sense in a conversation on the bus; the reference was to an arab teenager who had a black girlfriend.

In the Canadian context though, the word (especially when capitalized) has acquired a tighter meaning: the families of European trappers and their Indian brides, typically French and Cree respectively, born in the fur trade era, and their decendants.