Then there was the Mad Russian, who made her laugh and behaved
impossibly badly and proposed to her daily. Some other shorter-lived
liaisons, now forgotten. Then Henry.
— William Nicholson, Secret Intensity Of Everyday Life
In the context, the narrator says the word liaison without rendering any moral viewpoint. Though many dictionaries contain moral defects in the word, Longman Advanced American Dictionary says liaison means “a sexual relationship between two people who are not married” without any further moral angles, and Merriam-Webster says it means “a close bond or connection”.
Can we use the word liaison casually, like in the example?
Best Answer
The OED provides in its sense 2 both an older, generic subsense and a newer, specific subsense.
The generic one is:
while the specific one is:
(Although today, one should probably write that as an illicit intimacy regardless of the sex of the two parties: man and man, man and woman, woman and man, woman and woman.)
However, both debuted in the early 19th century, so it is probably not right to claim the one the elder use. There is a 17th century sense related to cooking, and also two more 19th century senses: one related to phonetics and the other a military term. The military liaison sense in particular is attractive, because there is no sexual overtone there at all.
I think you can sometimes get away with it. It just depends on context.