Thursday, May 14, 2015

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Model and general showbiz socialite partygoing type Cara Delevingne, and Jay from various Kevin Smith films, as played by Jason Mewes and more usually seen in the company of Silent Bob (aka Smith himself). Beanie hat, hair, eyebrows, bish bosh, sorted.


I don't attend prestigious fashion shows or trawl the society gossip columns all that much, so I know very little about Cara Delevingne. One thing that strikes me, though, is the weirdness of her surname: if you skim over it as most people do you'd assume it's spelt "Delavigne" and pronounced vaguely Frenchly as "Deller-veen". Or, to put it another way, like Avril Lavigne's surname, but with a "De" in front of it. But look more closely: firstly it's "Dele-" not "Dela-", which is weird, since French doesn't work that way ("de le" being rendered as "du"), secondly there's a rogue "n" before the "g". So does that mean it's pronounced more Germanically as "Deller-ving-nuh" or something? I've no idea, and while this Evening Standard article gives some interesting background on her ultra-posh ancestry it doesn't help with any of that.

I expect it's some sort of upper-class shibboleth like the old Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh-Beauchamp thing where the nobs can chortle at the lower orders struggling with all these extra letters they've bunged in just to trip us up. Most people seem to just go with "Deller-veen", anyway.

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