''Creme'' is an abomination, conceived in pretension, sired in affectation, borne with lifted pinkie, and brought up to be deliberately ambiguous. The merchants of youth have produced a word that is neither French - for without the accent grave, the word is not French - nor English, which already has the word spelled another way. For a word crossing into another language, dropping an accent is no big deal - unless the result is confusion, and then it is a big deal indeed.Ĭookbooks remain true to proper French: Creme Senegalaise and creme brulee carry that delicious little soup,con of an accent over the first ''e,'' and the reader is thus directed to pronounce it ''krem.'' Elizabeth Pearce at Gourmet magazine says, ''Our policy is to print all accents.'' Ole! The Saturday matinee has dropped its accent and retained its long ''a.'' David Guralnik at Webster's New World Dictionary reports that divorcee is becoming ''divorcee,'' and nee has become ''nee,'' though both are pronounced with the original long ''a'' (nee, nee nay). Granted, there is a tendency in English to drop discriminating accents - those grave or aigu marks that point the way to pronounce a letter in French. The way to pronounce the French word creme is ''krem,'' but the way to pronounce the nonword creme is ''kreem'' - unless you feel like pronouncing it ''krem,'' in violation of both English and French rules of pronunciation. One reason that Estee (I've just dropped her accent) Lauder and the others have deaccented ''creme'' is, I suspect, to introduce confusion into the word's pronunciation. The cosmeticians wanted a word that sounded like ''cream'' and looked like creme - simultaneously familiar and ritzy. ''Cream'' needed toning up, and creme was too toney. Additionally, it connotes a sense of luxury.''Īh, now we're getting deep down past the dead-cell layers to lavish on the essentially moist truth of it all. She wanted it dropped to indicate that the creme was for facial use rather than something to eat.'' (Presumably, people have been eating ''cold cream'' with a spoon, not realizing it was for facial use.) ''Dropping the accent was then extended to include treatment products as well as facial products. With candor, Arlene Ritz, Estee Lauder's spokeswoman, asserts: ''The decision to drop the accent from 'creme' in our advertising was made by Mrs. But since creme is a word that the cosmetics industry has borrowed from the French and Americanized, we don't feel there is any need to put the accent on a product's English name.'' Some French firms, such as Carita, reject not only the spelling but the idea of cream, preferring liquids but at Chanel, Catherine D'Alessio, the firm's president, observes smoothly: ''When a product's French name includes the word creme - 'Creme Douce,' for example - Chanel uses the appropriate accent. That excuse could use a splash of astringent: Red-blooded typesetters stand ready to circumflex their muscles. Why not, then, spell the word the way the French spell it - ''creme,'' with an accent grave over the first ''e''? Unctuously, some cosmetics executives murmur about the difficulty of getting American typesetters to use accents over letters.
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