avant la lettre en · ADP
Etymology
Borrowed from French avant la lettre (literally “before the letter”).
Meanings
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(idiomatic) Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)
a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef.
2007, Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, page 107:Suffragettes were feminists avant la lettre.
You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre.
2015 February 27, Laura Kipnis, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education:Could the Greeks of that time, whose minds were frustrated and demoralized by defeat and misery, be expected to give a welcome to those premature Quakers and to those Tolstoyans “avant la lettre”?
1952, George Sarton, A History of Science:One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous
2010, Stefano Evangelista, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, page 65:How is it, then, that Flaubert was a somber impressionist avant la lettre, when the school of painters was remarkably cheerful with the exception of both Degas and Van Gogh?
1973, Marlies Kronegger, Literary Impressionism:as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre
1998, Dominik Declercq, Writing Against the State: Political Rhetorics in Third and Fourth Century China, page 341:
Relateds
Translations (5)
fi ennen sanan olemassaoloa (Translations) · nl avant la lettre (Translations) · pl avant la lettre (Translations) · fr avant la lettre (Translations) · it ante litteram (Translations)