Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three other Americans were kidnapped--Frank Herbert Reed, Joseph James Cicippio and Edward Austin Tracy--and other groups claimed to be holding them. Christian radio stations and television reported the previous two days that six kidnapped Americans and two of eight French hostages would be freed...
...clue to the activity of viruses emerged during World War I, when a British and a French scientist independently noticed the appearance of clear circular spots in laboratory cultures grown over with bacteria. When material from a clear spot was applied to a different location in the bacteria culture, another circular area devoid of bacteria soon appeared. Felix d'Herelle, the French bacteriologist, thought he knew why. "What caused my clear spots," he wrote, "was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria." D'Herelle named the unseen bug a bacteriophage (from the Greek...
Sacrebleu! Guardians of the French language were shocked last week to discover new words derived from foreign tongues included in the latest edition of the venerable Academie Francaise dictionary. The academy, which has been the arbiter of standard French usage since 1635, added 912 new words to the new volume, or about a quarter of its contents. What will rile purists is that 75% of the new entries, while rooted in Greek or Latin, are based on English technical or scientific terms. Says Academy Member Henri Gouhier: "English, like all foreign languages, is both threatening and enriching...
Among the unwelcome additions are anorak, or parka, which the dictionary carefully attributes to Eskimos, not Anglophone backpackers. Other offenders: auto-stop, auburn and bacon. To those who cannot abide Franglais, as English words used in French are called, each such entry is a babelisme, which the new dictionary defines as the "degradation of a language by the invasion of foreign words...
...Paris, a French Foreign Ministry official, speaking anonymously in accordance with custom, said the report that the hostages had been turned over to Syrians and were about to be freed was "without foundation...