Why this word is great
MONSEIGNEUR — [Noun] An honorific title for an eminent person in France, historically reserved for princes, bishops, and high dignitaries of the Ancien Régime. Borrowed from Middle French monseigneur, from Old French mon ("my") + seignor ("lord, sire"), from Latin senior ("older, elder"). Unlike "monsieur," a polite, egalitarian address for any man, or "monsignor," its Italianate, ecclesiastically-bound cousin, "monseigneur" evokes the gilded hierarchy of a vanished world. It is the glacial formality of a Versailles antechamber, the heavy silk of a bishop's rochet, and the precise, invisible distance between a kneeling subject and a seated prince—a word that built walls of air and expectation, turning power into an object of grammar, now preserved in the amber of a vanished world.