Ordinarily my husband is punctilious in keeping the pages of the Telegraph straight, especially when it is read by other people (me). ‘It’s all scrunched up,’ he exclaims if even the notoriously loose slip-page in the paper is misaligned. But he shook the sports pages into a toy-boat shape and slapped them against his leg when he read out this sentence: ‘There is a belief that a marquee annual tournament would develop cricket’s following.’
‘Are they going to play it in a tent?’ he cried, knowing they weren’t. The sports pages have imported a peculiar new meaning for marquee. Its classic form is in the phrase marquee signing, which means ‘new star’.
This sense comes from American showbiz. Since the 1920s, marquee has been used there for the canopy over the entrance to a theatre or cinema.
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