20 February 2007

Debuse abusé

In a petty, whining editorial in this month's issue of the Contemporary Review of American Poetry Brodersen coins a new epithet "Debusean", which he defines in a footnote as:
given to predictable modes while inflating ones own originality
Now it is true that this is not a common adjective, but of the nineteen occurences of Debusean to be found in a popular search engine, the most common definition would seem to be:
Debusean
startlingly unpredictable, under-appreciated, critically incisive.
A less magnanimous scholar than I might be tempted to define an epithet Brodersenian at this point. But check your dictionaries... we already have a perfectly good word for cretin.

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