What is Prestige?

I really like the word “prestige.” I find it extraordinarily helpful when it comes to organizing my own thoughts, but sometimes that causes hiccups in communication with others who use it differently than I do. Oxford defines prestige as “widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements and quality,” which sounds more positive than the way I usually mean it. “Widespread perception” is something I’m fundamentally wary of, so the word “prestige” always reads like a warning to me. It’s like how the term “viral” is sometimes attached to words like “success” or “popularity” in order to make them sound suspicious. Back in the seventeenth century, when the word “prestige” first caught on in the Anglosphere, it was actually being used in a very similar way.

In 1937, the British diplomat Harold Nicolson published a treatise on “The Meaning of Prestige” via The Atlantic that can help us understand the relevant historical context. “The word ‘prestige’ derives from the Latin verb praestringere as generally employed in the phrase praestringere oculos, ‘to bind or dazzle the eyes.’” he writes. “from this verb comes the even more disreputable substantive praestigia, which means nothing more or less than ‘juggler’s tricks.’” The word itself came to us from France, and Nicolson reminds us that in French classical literature, the word prestige “is invariably used with a lively sense of its disreputable origins.” A sense that is undiminished, he adds, by the similarity it bears to the word prestidigitateur, which means “magician.”

“To the French mind,” Nicolson writes. “the word prestige should sometimes carry with it associations of fraudulence. At its best, it conveys something akin to our own words ‘glamour’ and ‘romance.’ At its worst, it suggests the art of the illusionist, if not a deliberate desire to deceive.” As the word became popular in English-speaking countries, it “lost all association with jugglers or conjurers” and flattened into the one-dimensional shadow of itself described in the dictionary definition of the word today. I think that’s a shame. We could use a word that captures the experience of being impressed by something that you know for a fact is bullshit. A word that’s like, the highest possible compliment you could ever pay to a lie without going over the line and believing it.

The decade we all just lived through was a