You Can Stop Writing Now (Administrative Note)

When we decided to rebel against the standard orthographic practice of rendering the term "art form" as two separate words, we gave brief notice of our decision in a footnote to this 2006 post. And in 2005 when we decided to abandon our Quixotic campaign against the ugly terms "blog" and "blogger" by substituting the more correct "weblog" and "weblogger", we made announcement of our decision here. We, however, gave no notice nor did we make any announcement explaining or justifying our referring to the Berliner Philharmoniker as the Berlin Philharmoniker (as we did here, here, and here) as we thought our use of the phrase self-explanatory and so none was needed.

Clearly, we were wrong about that as the eMail still dribbles in suggesting either that we made a typo (numerous times, over three posts?!), or, worse, that we're ignorant of the spelling of the orchestra's name (it never, even for an instant, crossed our mind that any reader of S&F could think or imagine such a thing).

So, to put a stop to this, herewith our rationale.

We don't use Berliner Philharmoniker as its use by an English speaker (or writer) sounds pretentious to our ear (as, on the contrary, Bayreuther Festspiele does not). And we don't use the English equivalent, Berlin Philharmonic, as it misses entirely the German-ness of the organization; ergo, our Berlin Philharmoniker (i.e., Berlin's Philharmoniker as opposed to, say, Hamburg's, Munich's, or Stuttgart's).

Do you consider that a bastardization by us, or, worse, illiterate?

If so, you're entitled, as are we.

You can stop writing now.