Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...increasingly turned toward the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. No one asked him what was going on in Europe, only whether he liked it in California. Last month a television-news crew staked out the portals of the Beverly Hills Hotel as the visiting Jacques Chirac, the former French Premier and still well-known mayor of Paris, strode inside, trailing limousines and entourage. The TV crew failed to budge. Turns out it was there to cover a more important celebrity, wrestler Hulk Hogan...
...electronic age, the ancient Babylonian constant -- or rather the accurate calculation of its value -- has become a symbol of computational prowess. In the 1950s the U.S. led the way, churning out estimates of pi accurate to thousands and tens of thousands of decimal places. Then the French took the lead. With the emergence of Japan's supercomputer industry in the 1980s, pi has become an almost exclusive province of the Japanese. The last world record, 201 million digits, was set on a Japanese supercomputer...
...Sihanouk, the Cambodian resistance leader who is notorious for his own shifting stance on his country, has at least found a way to keep up with its changing names. When he speaks English, he calls the country Cambodia. When he speaks Khmer, he calls it Kampuchea. When he speaks French, he refers to it as Cambodge...
...screw people over without their knowing it." Although 150 years separate the master novelist from the Rolling Stone nihilist, their contempt for social artifice is identical. The difference, of course, is that one of them has a savage comic flair. The other one wrote in French...
...Harvard graduate with a major in French literature, Wylie drove a cab and communed with Andy Warhol before finding his calling as an agent. In 1980 he signed up author I.F. Stone after singing Homeric verse to him on the phone -- in Greek, of course. (Wylie later handled Stone's unlikely 1988 best seller, The Trial of Socrates.) Three years ago, Wylie persuaded British agents Gillon Aitken and Brian Stone to form a partnership. Wylie has brought Susan Sontag and other distinguished authors to the firm, yet many of the big names on his list are either one-shot autobiographers...