Creuse is still the safest place to live in France - The Bugle

FEBRUARY 2010 ○ THE BUGLE ○ www.thebugle.eu
20 ♦ LANGUAGE & GAMES
One hyphen or two...
France has a certain reputation
for being very protective of
its language. The Académie
française, guardians of the
French Language, will often go to
great lengths to create a new word rather than
assimilate a word from another language or
culture.
One bizarre rule, the root of which France
need not look outside its borders for, is the
‘double--hyphenated’ surname.
In 2005, the French government declared that,
for any new surnames created by combining
surname) and newly created compound
names. In theory, under this law, any child
born to the presidential couple would have
been called Bruni--Sarkozy.
The new breed of double-barrelled surnames
became common in France after 2002 when it
first became possible to create a new nom de
famille by appending one parent’s surname to
that of the other.
Horrified parents have been campaigning
against the ruling since its creation and it
finally looks like they have won. The Conseil
d’Etat, France’s highest administrative
Crossword
Clues and answers in English
Would the presidential couple really have named their children Bruni--Sarkozy
those of the two parents, a double-hyphen
must be used to separate the two halves of
the name.
The logic behind the strange decision, as is
so often the case in such matters, is one of
administration. The powers that be decided
double-hyphenation would make it easier
from an administrative point of view to
distinguish between traditional doublebarrelled
surnames, such as Sarkozy de
Nagy-Bocsa (the current President’s actual
watchdog, has sided with the doublebarrelled
brigade and declared that the state
had overstepped the legal mark and were
guilty of butchering the French language.
The unfortunate few born in the intervening
years, which best guesses suggest to be
around 175,000, will have the choice of
removing one of the hyphens from their
name. That, or spend their adult lives with a
doubly hyphenated, grammatically incorrect,
double-barrelled surname! ■
Across:
1. Pub (6)
4. Take for granted (6)
9. Weird (7)
10. Take place (5)
11. Expiation (9)
12. Sense organ (3)
13. Stage whisper (5)
15. Paragon (5)
20. Sphere (3)
22. Vortex (9)
24. Tine (5)
25. Ameliorated (7)
26. Cure (6)
27. Extremely bad (6)
Down:
1. Tropical bird (6)
2. Asinine (7)
3. Ambit (5)
5. Yelled (7)
6. Relative (5)
7. Mistakes (6)
8. Varieties (5)
14. Injured (7)
16. Foreshorten (7)
17. Barrel maker (6)
18. Wild and savage (5)
19. Blot (6)
21. Flower (5)
23. Part of a play (5)
SUDOKU - EASY SUDOKU - MEDUIM SUDOKU - HARD
The solution to all this month’s puzzles can be found on page 22