Friday, July 29, 2011

Word of the day: sobriquet

The word of the day is sobriquet:

French, of uncertain origin.
 
An epithet, a nickname. (OED)


"You should know about Blinky Palermo.  By the time he died, suddenly, at the age of thirty-three, in 1977, the quicksilver German artist, who was born Peter Schwarze, brought up as Peter Heisterkamp, and took on a crook's sobriquet, had achieved a body of work furiously intelligent and beautiful."

 - Peter Schjeldahl, "The prodigy: Blinky Palermo at Bard and Dia", 11 & 18 July 2011 The New Yorker

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