avant la lettreとは 意味・読み方・使い方

前置詞句

avant la lettre

1. (idiomatic) Before the term was coined (the term being a word or phrase used just previously in an anachronistic way)

   Suffragettes were feminists avant la lettre.

   (the word "feminist" did not exist during their era)

   • 1952, George Sarton, A History of Science:

     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”?

   • 1973, Marlies Kronegger, Literary Impressionism:

     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?

   • 1998, Dominik Declercq, Writing Against the State: Political Rhetorics in Third and Fourth Century China, page 341:

     as St Francis of Assisi was recently discovered to be an ecologist avant la lettre

   • 2007, Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, page 107:

     a work with a title that is a marketing dream, pure Julia Child well avant la lettre: Le Cuisinier français, The French Chef.

   • 2010, Stefano Evangelista, The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, page 65:

     One might even advance the case for Wilde's being a celebrity avant la lettre, famous partly for being famous

   • 2015 February 27, Laura Kipnis, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education‎:

     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.

参考

• retronym
• proto
• proto-

参照

• “avant la lettre”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.