if_i_really_have_to: Heron: bel4sucks: "Nom de rap"..... farkin white people

Well, pretentious people. "Stage name" would have served well enough but I guess the writer was feeling like a bit of a showboat.

Huh, so the state of American education has degraded past the point where the very common phrase 'nom de plume' and any variation thereof is one that only showboat pretentious elites use.

Good to know. Sad, but good to know.

To begin with, my "pretentious" comment was more a joking response about how pretentiousness isn't an exclusive thing to white folks, which the joking comment I was responding to sort of implies. As to the phrase in question, I just think it's a silly way to refer to music artists. It certainly isn't a common usage in criticism, and I've never seen a singer use "nom de plume", or any variation thereof, instead of "stage name". Do critics even use that for author pen-names anymore? I certainly haven't read a review that did in the last decade.

The whole point of that first paragraph up there is that the "nom de" construction isn't an immediately obvious one in critical writing in the US (in or out of academia), which makes its use a decision of style. He chose to use it; he didn't just grab a common turn of phrase. And why choose it? For the same reason any author makes a stylistic decision in non-fiction writing; to make a statement about himself. He wanted to let the reader know that he, a culture writer at Wired, was the sort of guy who put French phraseology into his articles. Now, if this were the 1920s, or if he were writing for the New York Review of Books, then that wouldn't be a big deal; in fact it'd be taken for granted that he'd do that sort of thing. But in a Wired article about a Korean pop star? Of course it stands out; that's why he used it.

Now none of it's a big deal. I'm not sitting here stewing in resentment for an author who's name I didn't even bother to read, over a single word choice. Diction isn't srsbsn to me, or anything. However, if your take away from an off-handed comment about archaic phraseology is that the US public education system is a broken down hellhole, then I'm going to have to write a three paragraph essay explaining the usually unspoken reasoning behind why I, and certain other commentors on the internet, might find such things moderately ridiculous.