Friday, July 24, 2009

BoRhap takes on a nouveau meaning


Media Moment: BBC Series on Paris
Queen Related: segment called Bohemian Rhapsody

In 2007, the BBC produced a three-part series on the city of Paris and featured a Parisian host named Sandrine Voillet who led viewers through three one-hour segments that chronicled key moments and figures in the city’s history.

Part three of this series is called Bohemian Rhapsody, although it has nothing to do with the song, apparently. I suspect that the song’s popularity has made its title an actual noun in the English language.

Coining a new term was probably not Freddie’s intention when he wrote the song, but a quick look at the Merriam-Webster and American Oxford dictionaries actually gives credence to its use as a new descriptive noun:

Bohemian: “a person (as a writer or an artist) living an unconventional life usually in a colony with others”
Rhapsody: “an effusively enthusiastic or ecstatic expression of feeling”

Put the two concepts together and they do seem to embody the spirit of Paris over the past two hundred years or so. Such a spectrum of intellectual, musical, philosophical, and literary characters called Paris home that it does seem like the city became a mecca for the Illuminati, Glitterati, cognoscenti, and all the other “–tis” that existed at the time.

I did find some irony in the British Broadcasting Corporation funding a television special on a French city with a French host but titled it after a British band’s song.

http://www.open2.net/paris/bohemianrhapsody.html

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