Sacre bleu!

Friday, 4 November 2005 — 12:19pm | Journalism

It’s probably a measure of how out of touch I’ve been lately that I didn’t know about the new biweekly two-page supplement in The Gateway until this morning. Let it be known that Le Miroir is neither as backwards as its name implies nor miserable and inadequate as its host language suggests. There’s no online version, but as happenchance would have it, one of the contributors to its debut spread lives within striking distance of my Linksys router and has kindly (or narcissistically) provided a sample hither.

I welcome the campus broadsheet’s latest appendage with open appendages of my own. Part of it is that it will assist me in slowing the atrophy of my aptitude for comprehending the loverly language of diminuitive Alp-crossing conquerors. French is fun to read even when it’s not relegated to demanding hefty Austro-German reparations, and I find it encouraging for the paper to declare itself “tout simplement francophile” in its mission statement. And beyond that, Thursday’s Miroir, tucked into pages 10 and 11, looks terrific – it’s typeset in the standard Gateway style, fitting right into the same InDesign templates, but the absence of intrusive advertising materials makes a huge difference.

Disregarding content for now, the only really visible copyediting problem is in an opinion piece by some bloke who calls himself Carl “Le Cat” Charest. No, not the unordered-list formatting problem – that’s a lesser concern. Let me put it this way: I don’t know if using italics AND all caps for emphasis (particularly the latter) is as frowned upon in the other langue officielle as it is in mine, but I always figured it was the case. It hurts us, preciousss.

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