By Brian Blanchfield, from Proxies, an essay collection that will be published in April by Nightboat Books. Blanchfield is the author, most recently, of A Several World, a volume of poetry.

I can’t bring myself to rhyme it with “cottage,” but I’ve heard it pronounced that way. The French pronunciation makes it sound like a delectation, a frill or a whip, a froth. Anyway that’s the one I say when I say it. I don’t know when I first had the word, or whose word it was — not someone I did it with. I know I was doing it…