When we were doing our tour of the village a few weeks ago our guide pointed out to us the spot where the community oven :- Le Four Banal used to stand .
Now there’s a word which has made a huge leap in meaning , from describing something which is enjoyed by all the community to something which is trite , commonplace and humdrum.
But the amazing thing about the word Banal (and the jump is exactly the same in English as in French) is that it has made this leap into pejorative meaning without really changing in meaning at all- rather it is our attitude to community which has changed.
A Four Banal at one time was indicitative of a real triumph of civilization. It was the acknowledgement that instead of everyone having their own oven to cook their stews , bake their breads and even (I suppose) heat water for washing clothes they could instead pool their resources and have an oven that all could avail of.
Then somewhere along the line (about the time perhaps when M. Chagal had a good year on the vines and bought Mme. Chagal her own personal oven ) it became unfashionable to use Le Four Banal, it became something that the oven-less ladies of the village used, the less well off , the common people.
And so the practices of the less well off community became a stick with which their better off neighbours could beat them . Their practice became commonplace , of the ordinary , and therefore uninteresting.

It is interesting to look at another word in English which has made exactly the same leap into pejorative meaning ; the word Common.

Common and its change in meaning is perhaps a little more subtle. Its pejorative meaning used nowadays (or at least in my youth) indicated something which was percieved of being in a class below one’s own.
My father abhored that we should call the driveway outside our house as “The Yard ” , that we might say things like “I amn’t” or pronounce “Forty” farrty, these practices were “common ” .
When I worked at one time for an upperclass Protestant family they used to murmer N.O.C.D to each other when confronted by someone who might be beneath them , after a while I worked that the letters stood for Not Our Class Dear or, as my father would have said “Common”.
The subtlties of meaning wern’t restricted to the upper and middle class.
At one stage , while working for a restaurant in the country , one of the waitresses , a small farmers daughter , refused point blank to wear wellingtons to get to work on a snowy night. She had she reckoned bettered herself and regarded the wearing of wellies (her father’s perpetual footwear) as “common”.

And so it is that two good servicable words , both indicitive of a civilizing moment in our history, have been brought down by snobbery.