Es-que tu penses que je suis de trop pédant?

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My expectactions from Entertainment Weekly are probably too high. However, they seem like they want to be the kind of a magazine that can open a story with a sentence including the phrase "fin-de-siècle". So surely they're willing to hear some criticism on the matter. If you're going to try and be clever with French phrases, stick to the same language. You cannot, as they have done in their latest issue, insert 20th into the middle of it. If you must tamper at all, you really ought to say "fin-de-XXe-siècle. The whole sentence, for the curious is "When Rent opened on Broadway in 1996, the story of young artists dealing with poverty and AIDS in fin-de-20th-siècle New York City shook the blue-haired theater scene and spawned a cult of obsessive repeat visitors known as Rentheads."

I am glad, though, that they included the accent grave.

1 comments:

Sean said...

"fin-de-20th-siècle"?? What were they thinking? Ack.

"fin-de-XXe-siècle" sounds wrong, too, though. I'd say "fin-du-XXe-siècle" if I said anything approaching this at all. Which, if I were writing for EW, I wouldn't. Partly because I would be too busy trying to decide between wrist-slitting and cyanide as methods of ending my life as a miserable hack.

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