Word: franca
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Everyone everywhere can drink Coke (almost $3 billion in foreign sales) and wear Levi's ($600 million) and watch Little House on the Prairie (broadcast in 110 countries). The lingua franca dispersion of English is both a cause and an effect of pop's global reach, but American pop commodities are also successful abroad because they work. Blue jeans are well designed and rugged. Most Hollywood filmmaking is technically impeccable. "American TV is extraordinarily beguiling to the Poles," says Sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, who lived in Warsaw for 18 months, "for the technical quality alone...
...combatants, we are all volunteers." His job is to teach reading and writing to the troops. After supper he conducts a lesson: "Maman est tres belle .. . Maman a une belle robe . .. Bonjour, maman." Since there are 300 different languages in Chad, French is the lingua franca...
...nearly two decades, Dario Fo has been one of Italy's, and Europe's, best-known satirists and actors. Americans have heard little of him, for good reason. Fo and his wife, the actress Franca Rame, were about to embark on an American tour in 1980, when the U.S. State Department banged the door shut. State invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act in order to protect the country from Fo's leftist opinions...
Indeed, it is Western, not traditional music, that has become the Japanese lingua franca. On television, the strains of Voi che sapete from The Marriage of Figaro plug Suntory whisky, and a Strauss waltz is used as a background for a refrigerator-deodorizer ad. At a children's concert by the New Japan Philharmonic recently, more than 2,000 grade schoolers in the audience rose at the conductor's behest and, in two-part harmony, sang the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth...
...Italy. When the pair landed in Rome, they were met by the CIA's "M" and a cadre of American and Italian intelligence agents. Lombino was hustled away to a hotel a block from the U.S. embassy. Twice during the next day, he met with Franca Musi, a Red Brigades courier who had been captured two weeks earlier in Rome. The Italians thought that Musi, whose family had underworld connections, might give valuable information to Lombino, but she claimed only to know that Dozier was being held some where in Padua...