Word: bleus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...balance, then, this is a very literate Lafpoon, and one with the same possibilities that the Ugly Duckling promised. But it is as unprovocative as it can be. If the good burghers of Bayeux ever see a copy, they may mutter a few "Sacre bleus," but who else could it provoke? Even the Lampoon's toothless progenitor, Punch, doesn't shy away from talking politics. Nor should the Lampoon, which never takes a stand, never catches you unawares, never makes you drop your jaw and the magazine at an outrageous line. In olden days, jesters felt obliged to insult monarchs...
Tastes have also changed. Tourists-with the possible exception of the Germans-no longer have the ambition to plow through such weighty tomes as the Guides Bleus, which describe every stone and tree in fine print. "To sell," says one London publisher, "you have to put out atmospherics. You have to provide a well-written feeling for the place, a lot of color, a lot of narrative." Such books are all to the good, for when they are done by sensitive writers, they can achieve an almost poetic understanding of places they cover. One such series is the Companion Guides...
...highly ambiguous language. He has insisted throughout that U.N. troops are there only to guarantee Katanga's isolation, to freeze a murderously explosive military situation (in which Mr. Tshombe has spoken of poisoned arrows and "scorched earth") so that negotiations to subsume Katanga may continue. His casques bleus, he has innocently announced, are not at all intended to force any particular political objectives...
...fortified by Mr. Tshombe's talk of "scorched earth" and his attempts to blow up several key Union Miniere installations. Even what M. Spaak describes as his "preoccupation," meaning alarm, with the more confusing aspects of the U.N. expedition (such as the presumed communications failure which led the casques bleus to take the city of Jadotville after U Thant's order not to, and Dr. Bunche's subsequent implied endorsement of that victory) cannot really deflect the growing tide of Belgian consent...
...British backs, and so the Foreign Secretary also clung nervously to possible alternatives. In the shadow of Lord Home's strikingly Gaullist pronouncements on the proper function of the U.N. lay two profound fears: that the new federation would injure British financial interests in Katanga, and that the casques bleus would march firmly into any settlement of the touchy Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland...