You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

I'm not sure why this is important enough to post about, but I feel the need to write it down somewhere. I've recently been listening to the original cast recording of Les Miserables, and I've always been amused by the lyric in "Red and Black" - "we talk of battles to be won, and here he comes like Don Ju-an." The English lit geek in me loves the "joo-ahn" pronunciation, because there is a poem by Lord Byron titled Don Juan, and because of the rhyme that happens the (I think) first time the name comes up, you're meant to pronounce it as if it rhymes with "true one" from two lines above (i.e., "joo-ahn"). This pronunciation anomaly only applies to Byron's poem, by the way - at least in my world. :P

I never thought about it beyond a smile whenever I heard it in that song, but for some reason a few hours ago it occurred to me to look up the dates and see if it was, in fact, a timely cultural reference. And it is! Most of the story of Les Miserables (the novel and the musical) takes place in 1823. The first cantos of Don Juan were published in 1819 (in other words, four years before), and it was an extremely popular work. It's quite likely to have been known by students like Marius and Enjolras the others, and I could easily see the funny pronunciation being a scholarly in-joke (much like it is for English lit geeks today :P).