– published in Thema’s “There’s a Word for That” issue (2018) 
gauche\gohsh\adjective
- Lacking social grace, sensitivity, or acuteness; awkward, crude; tactless.
If the word fits, wear it. And I wear this one well. A turn in the mirror, I see it sets on me like a fine tailored suit from Brooks Brothers. Ho yeah, you the gauche man! It’s all over me. Just ask my wife, Geraldine. A little snicker from her when she comes into my studio and I tell her the word of the day I’m working on. Lacking social grace. Check. Awkward. Check. Crude. Check. I traced the word’s origins back to the gaucho, those mythic rough riders of the South American pampas that Borges wrote about in his early stories “Streetcorner Man” and “The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz.” Borges liked his gaucho’s marginal, and ready for anything, a knife fight, a shootout. I suppose there’s no doubt gauchos are gauche, insensitive and tactless, hence the logical connection between the two. Most of them anyway; there are always exceptions. Nevertheless, I’m not one of them. The exception, that is. I can see myself riding a horse on the Patagonian grasslands, herding cattle with a lasso or bola, cooking rice, beans, and chunks of beef over a campfire. It seems a better way to spend my days than at a desk. Of course, I’m joking. And also about the relationship between gauche and gaucho. Gaucho has nothing to do with its genealogy. Nothing at all. I digressed again. So back to gauche. Couldn’t it also be a noun, as in, a gauche. I’m a gauche. You’re a gauche. We are gauches. What school do you think that ditty would be associated with? We are. Gauches. We are… One with a tiny enrollment, I’m sure. Maybe one that only accepted gauchos? Where do you go to school? Gauche U. To learn to be a gaucho? For what other reason were you thinking? To be a butler? Now I’m reminded of a long-ago cookout at a big house on the seashore north of Boston. And I mean a big house, twenty, twenty-five rooms, eight or so bathrooms, yadda yadda. The hosts’ son was the husband of a college friend of Geraldine. It was a soft, summer afternoon. Ten or twelve of us sat at a table on the patio eating lobster, clams, and corn-on-the-cob, drinking bottles of beer and gin-and-tonics; out ahead the Atlantic Ocean stretched to the horizon. Our hosts were generous, formal, a touch snobby as their son was, and as we were finishing up the son’s mother, a woman around sixty years old, looked over at me and said: “You were very well trained.” She was being nice, of course. Complimentary, I knew. Yet, I was bemused. Well trained? Did she mean like a poodle or schnauzer? Or like a homo erectus who had just walked out of the State of Nature but was able to manage a knife and fork? I wasn’t sure. But it was apparent to everyone there this working-class stiff, this Gauche U. grad, was anything but “well trained” in the way she meant it. Which brings me back to the definition and the woman’s lack of the social graces she thought she was representative of and assumed I wasn’t or was a wannabe of. And what else must have been apparent to everyone at that table was that woman was as gauche as I, though hers was just a different kind of tactlessness.
Paul Perilli 