Word: french
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...What's French for "be careful what you wish for?" Just ask the 19 million voters who flocked to the straight-talking, populist presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy last spring. Many of them apparently now find themselves mortified by their president's flashy private life and penchant for talking trash. Recent surveys show Sarkozy's approval rating falling to new lows of 38%, and pollsters are attributing the decline to voters' spying a vulgarity in their president incompatible with their standards for the office. Apparently, Sarkozy isn't getting the message. On the weekend jaws dropped anew as he publicly insulted...
...touch me, you make me dirty." Visibly piqued, Sarkozy twice ordered the man to "bugger off," the second time adding the insult usually reserved for locker rooms and school yards. Though the incident took only seconds, the exchange was immortalized on camera and uploaded to the web site of French daily Le Parisien, where it had been viewed nearly a million times by Monday morning. Against a background of sliding poll numbers, the video turned the verbal swipe into a political event...
...Employment Minister Xavier Bertrand complained about the inordinate attention the spat had generated, though noted people "don't have the right to humiliate the president" with comments he qualified as "hurtful." Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier also cast his boss as a victim in the affair, saying, "I sense the French people have had enough of the systematic aggressiveness towards Nicolas Sarkozy (and) the government...
...Where Sarkozy's blunt speech and take-charge manner had earlier won him cheers, polls suggest that those qualities now strike many French voters as intemperate, belligerent and undignified. This weekend's incident was not the first. During a visit last November to a Breton fishing port, one fisherman's taunts and insults got so under the president's skin that he dared his heckler to come face him. During his first major press conference as president in January, Sarkozy took such deep exception to questions from journalists he considered unfriendly that some of his replies struck observers as petulant...
...Consider Quebec: Separatists north of the border still agitate for a split from Canada, evidently believing that that now would be a great time to establish a Little France right next door to the United States, since Americans always react so happily to all things French - and what better tonic for a struggling global economy than another country that spends three-quarters of its work week threatening to go on strike and the remaining part walking off the job in a huff...