I guess it's supposed to be funny

Reviewing two books on the English language, Tom Shippey uses the French word "querelle".

One can then agree with Watts’s strictures over the Kingman Report, the Cox Report, the querelle over John Honey’s work in the 1980s and 90s, remarking only (as has been done several times in this journal) that much of the trouble came and comes from the fact that, by “grammar”, far too many educated English-speakers still mean a small set of trivial shibboleths.

Or maybe cute? It comes off as a little snooty to me.