Mind your language | 8 March 2008

A medical friend of my husband’s came to me in some distress, having stumbled upon an advertisement in the New Yorker mentioning a ‘documentary débuting November 6’. He was amused by the careful use of an acute accent, puzzled by the word’s pronunciation and shocked by the brutal transformation of a French noun into an English verb, of sorts. Annoyingly for those who find that this usage grates, the first example garnered by the Oxford English Dictionary is from as long ago as 1830, from Fraser’s Magazine: ‘He debuted at Naples, about five years ago, and has since performed in the principal theatres of Italy.’ Fraser’s Magazine had been founded in that year as a Tory vehicle; William Maginn, its co-founder, fought a duel in 1836 and died in poverty in 1842. But one can hardly blame his misfortunes on the misuse of a single word. In 1889 début as a verb was still being put in inverted commas by the racy Pall Mall Gazette: ‘A popular actor’s son “débuts” with a flourish of trumpets.’