Spot the Frippet: echelon.

 This word is usually encountered in the phrase the upper echelons, meaning the people in charge, or the people who think they are in charge, or the people who fancy they should be in charge.

This may be anyone from a general to a politician to a bishop to a teacher to someone whose great-aunt's father was a baronet.

It's a useful phrase because you know anyone who uses it is best avoided immediately and forever.

Some of us will see people from these upper echelons daily, but luckily there are other things which come in echelons.

The echelon I'm mostly likely to see is one of these:

By Hamid Hajihusseini - https://web.archive.org/web/20161017014407/http://www.panoramio.com/photo/43585282, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31237576

though the echelon I see will consist of Canada geese rather than the cranes in the photograph.

But in some places you may see this kind of an echelon:

photo: United States Air Force, Alaska

You sometimes get the same effect in an auditorium where everyone wants to get a good view of the stage...

...though you probably won't be seeing that this year.

Ah well. We'll hope for 2021 for that one, then.

Spot the Frippet: an echelon. This word comes from the French échelon, which is the rung of a ladder, from the Latin scala, which means ladder.