Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
From the story 'Liseuse' which I'm now writing and will publish sometime before the weekend. 
“It’s a paragraph, a line or stanza of a poem and it’s your youth, the first time you tasted love on your lips. It’s that hot summer where you could do nothing but lay still and hope for breezes. It’s the winter when first you let your breath come out in frozen plumes of smoke. It’s the tombs of Ancient Egypt, the surface of the moon and the sewers of Paris. It’s not in the paper, young man, it’s here in the Liseuse I hold in my hand. And this Liseuse holds words and all the dreams of those who dared put those words down in other times. It’s the ideas reaching across history that cared not for paper and glue and old men turning to dust in the company of dust-ridden pages, but eyes and hearts. Always eyes and hearts.”
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lovely ! i can't wait to read the whole thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
I completely agree with Harry. And I'm not even English. And we already have plenty of french words I gladly use (in favor of the newfangled Dutch spelling of those words... cadeau vs kado comes to mind...)
But that word lisseaausue doesn't say anything. It's a nonsense word. And I'd probably not even pronounce it rightly. Book is so much easier. Who cares if it's electronic or not?
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personally, i really don't care *what* you (or anyone) call it. i think it's a question of personal preference. that's why we also see some people saying "book", some people saying "ereader", some "reader", some "ebook"... well, more power to them, it's their choice. in french the word liseuse is quickly becoming the most common word for "dedicated electronic reading device", despite the fact that perhaps 2 or 3 years ago it was virtually unknown with that meaning. i've seen it used recently in Le Monde, for instance, to cite only one.
what i *do* find interesting (and frankly a bit disturbing) is the rather excessive antagonism and aggression displayed by the "anti-liseuse brigade" towards those who *do* like the word.
used on mobileread, people either *do* know what it means, or can easily figure it out, so that seems like rather a straw-man argument to me. and claiming that it's somehow wrong to use a french word in english... well, in light of the french words *already* commonly used in english (take a look at the list i linked to, or the graphic a few posts above), that seems pretty disingenuous.
as for the idea that there is already a "perfectly good" english word... well, that is an argument that seems a lot more sensible to me, but in fact, originally the reason some people decided to use liseuse was because it is an easy way to clearly differentiate between the device and the file, which in many cases is *not* clear from the currently used english words (when i say "ebook" i mean the file ; some people mean the device. "ereader" as jswolf will invariably point out is actually the name of an ebook format, making it even more potentially confusing. "device" could be *any* device... etc.).
in the end though, i really don't see why anyone should object so strenuously to other people's choice of language. it really shouldn't matter to them ; after all, no-one is forcing anyone else to use a word they dislike, whereas some people seem to want to force others *not* to use a word they like. it seems a bit xenophobic sometimes, frankly.