Dandies

The interpretive history of the "fop" can be illuminated
through the application of Saussure's explanation of the
systems of evolution, creation, and permanance in language. Thus,
the critical "texts" created by eighteenth-century critics are
subject to the same transformations, formations, and pressures that
prescribe, under certain conditions, the survival of meanings in
language. Like the history of surviving units of sounds and
meanings in the language, the value attached to the "fop" can be
viewed as a survivor from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
to the twentieth, guarded by the writings of "interpretive
authorities" of eighteenth-century studies.