Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines uses of the je-ne-sais-quoi in polite literature, particularly Bouhours and his contemporary the Chevalier de Méré, to refer to an imperceptible sign of social quality and distinction. It argues that the ruling class under Louis XIV in the third quarter of the 17th-century comes to cultivate ever subtler signs of cultural quality in order to distinguish itself from those it wishes to exclude, and that the je-ne-sais-quoi encapsulates this élitist process. The polite circle makes and distributes the je-ne-sais-quoi as an inherent quality among its members and their works. The term settles in late 17th-century culture, neither as a force of nature nor as a stroke of passion, but as a collective fabrication. It lends itself, as a result, to ridicule and satire in Congreve, Fielding, and other English authors of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as their French contemporaries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".