Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...corporate nameplates are also changing citizenship at a rapid clip. Doubleday books has gone to the West Germans, Brooks Brothers clothiers to the Canadians, Smith + & Wesson handguns to the British, Chesebrough-Pond's consumer products to a Dutch-British combine. General Electric television sets have been bought by the French, Carnation foods by the Swiss, General tires by the West Germans...
...fact, the question of what constitutes a truly American icon has become befuddling. A Sohio gasoline station? British Petroleum owns that company now. An Allis-Chalmers farm tractor? The West Germans manufacture those. Ball Park franks are owned by a British conglomerate; so is French's mustard. The take from Las Vegas' Dunes Hotel and Country Club, one of the best-known American gambling and entertainment centers, will soon go to its new Japanese owner. The latest hit recording by Country Singer Kenny Rogers is a foreign-owned product; his record label, RCA, is now West German property. And what...
...foreign shopping bender signals a major transformation in America's global economic role. For nearly four decades following World War II, the U.S. did the buying, savoring its role as the globe's foremost exporter of capital. U.S. investment power was so great that in 1968 French Economics Journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that American multinational companies like IBM and ITT threatened to turn Western Europe into an economic province. Concern about foreign cash flowing into the U.S. arose briefly in the 1970s, when a weak U.S. dollar and the emerging clout of OPEC prompted fear of an Arab...
...Wednesday afternoons when school is not in session, French children can tune in a popular TV game show that has no American parallel. The program confronts young contestants with invidious English expressions that have infiltrated common parlance and invites them to concoct substitutes in their own language. Some of the prizewinning neologisms: for milkshake, mouslait (literally, milk foam); for hot dog, saucipain (sausage bread); for fast- food outlet, restapouce (quick-bite restaurant). Outsiders often dismiss such exercises as evidence of France's obsession with maintaining the purity of its beloved tongue, especially against the encroachments of Franglais. But lately...
Worldwide, French is the first language of some 109 million people, fewer than those who primarily speak English (403 million), Spanish (266 million) or even Portuguese (154 million). Fifty years ago, British Writer W. Somerset Maugham correctly called French "the common language of educated men." Today that distinction incontestably goes to English in the fields of science, technology, economics and finance, not to mention movies, rock music and air travel. As French President Francois Mitterrand said last year, "France is engaged in a 'war' with Anglo-Saxon...