"Louche" revisited

Here is a link to an old column that I wrote in 1999 about the word louche.  This word now means something like 'shady, disreputable', though its definition in the OED is 'oblique, not straightforward.'

At the time, I only had my intuitions that the frequency of the word was increasing, but Google N-gram has made it easy to check this kind of thing.  Here is the Google N-gram chart: