Ellipse de la particule nobliaire

Ellipse de la particule nobiliaire

This is the information I needed. I just didn't know what it was called so that I could look it up :-)( Read more... )

Which, I'm afraid, means that Lancard should probably be addressing the Vicomte de Chagny (and differing capitalization rules between French and English on things like titles and street-names is a mine-field I have barely bothered to note) as "Chagny" by surname or "Lieutenant de Chagny" by (possible) profession, despite the fact that it sounds wrong. (I wonder if part of the problem is that it's short but not actually a single syllable?)

Somehow I can imagine Philippe's contemporaries -- his fellow-aristocrats -- addressing him casually as 'Chagny', just as the Earl of Essex might converse with 'old Norfolk', but for a commoner, who is, after all, Raoul's superior officer by seniority, to do it to Raoul -- who is not the holder of the family title but only a younger brother, and whose identity is not synonymous with that of his estates -- feels derogatory :-(

Pushkin fandom

I'd forgotten I used to have such a passion for Pushkin. All the symptoms of teenage fandom, with hindsight: I was hankering after Collected Editions, translating poems, failing to write essays because I was busy reading in Russian(!), reading historical novels and literary critiques about him and bringing his work into all sorts of unrelated conversations, and feeling immense excitement when someone else in England had actually heard of him. Exactly the way people behave over mangas or superheroes nowadays.

Funny how all that enthusiasm can simply be wiped away or redirected. I mean, I understand how it happened, but it seems in hindsight like somebody else's parallel life -- the person I might have been. The person I was probably intended to be.