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Which is the correct form of the following caption for a photo:

  • Night beauty in St Petersburg
  • St Petersburg night beauty

Or does the right sentence have to be "A night beauty in St Petersburg".

Should I use auxiliary verb here or article (a/an)?

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  • "Night beauty in City" sounds like a fine title to me. It doesn't necessarily need to be grammatical or a complete sentence. As a complete sentence, you might say "This photograph shows the beauty of the night in the city. Therefore I decided to call it 'city night beauty'." You don't need an article like 'a' or 'the' in a title like this.
    – Brandin
    Mar 22, 2015 at 11:04
  • I'm not clear if it is a specific city or just 'a city'. This will make a difference to how you say it.
    – WS2
    Mar 22, 2015 at 11:43
  • Beauty of the city at night -- you will need of and also probably the -- phrasing does not mean that possessives can be formed any which way.
    – Kris
    Mar 22, 2015 at 11:57
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    I would understand "Night beauty in City" as "a beautiful (girl) who typically moves about at night and has arrived in an urban place;" and "City night beauty" as, maybe, an attempt to say something of the sort of a beautiful (girl) who typically moves about the city at night." Even then the phrasing is awkward.
    – Kris
    Mar 22, 2015 at 12:00
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    @StepanPervikov Yes, night beauty would unambiguously be interpreted as referring to a night beauty, i.e., with beauty being a count noun, whose most common meaning (when it’s not further modified) is ‘a beautiful woman’. And the word night would just make it worse: it would end up meaning a lady of the night, which is a prostitute. “Night beauty” = “beautiful prostitute”. If you’re just talking about how beautiful St Petersburg looks at night, you can say something like “Beautiful St Petersburg nightscape/night-time scenery” or “Beautiful St Petersburg at night”, etc.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Mar 22, 2015 at 15:24

1 Answer 1

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Use beauteous instead:- "Beauteous night in St. Petersburg" carries no implication of attractive females, but simply suggests that the night is beautiful in St. Petersburg.

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  • 3
    There's nothing suggetive about "beautiful night in St. Petersburg"
    – Brian Hitchcock
    Mar 24, 2015 at 7:25

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