A photo cutline on the front page of the arts section of Saturday's Times, at least in my home-delivered print New England edition, reads, "The audience is unseen for the first half of 'Springsteen on Broadway,' which debut's on Sunday."
My hardcover Times Manual of Style and Usage insists, "debut. Use it as a noun (made a debut) or a modifier (debut recital), never as a verb (debuted)."
Even if one were to use it as a verb, doing so by adding an apostrophe "s" seems like a particularly egregious way of going about it.
It's one thing to see that sort of formulation in a high-school newspaper or in some free-on-the Internet publication. Or even on an inside page, or on a night when there's late-breaking news. But if the Times is going to try to position itself as a "premium product, premium price" and ask readers to pay $1,000 a year, the least it can do to hold up its end of the bargain is to try to get this stuff correct on an arts-section front. Or maybe it's old-fashioned or hopelessly naive of me to expect that the Times exercise some care about the proper use of the English language, and most of the other paying customers are just there to join in the wokeness? Anyway, it's hard to imagine seeing that sort of thing back in Allan Siegal's day. Perhaps it was caught and fixed for later New York editions.
