Word: frenched
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reasons for Charles de Gaulle's electoral triumph in Algeria last November was his giving Algerian women the vote. The woman who took most advantage of the offer was Néfissa Sid Cara, a schoolmarm who is the sister of a well-known pro-French Moslem politician. Running for the French National Assembly, she allowed no men to attend her meetings, and she had but one plank to her platform. "We want French law," one weeping woman told her. "My husband left me." "My husband took away my sons," said a veiled woman. "You must give them back...
Despite more than a century of French rule, the Moslem women of Algeria had few privileges and fewer rights. Having promised to respect Moslem customs, the French blinked at the practice of marrying off twelve-year-old girls (the right of djebr), often to men they had never seen. In classic Koranic fashion, husbands could get rid of a wife simply by saying, "I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you," or by tearing up the marriage papers ("breaking the cards," in Algerian slang). A woman had no legal rights over her children and could be cut off without...
Court tennis has changed little since it was played by monks in French monasteries some 700 years ago. and the court itself still reproduces many of the original hazards. The opening in the wall called the dedans might have been a water trough, and the player who can hit a ball into it wins the point. The serve is rolled along the side roof into the opponent's court, comes off it with an erratic spin. The oddly shaped racquets have changed little in design over hundreds of years. The game combines the strokes of lawn tennis with...
...Johann Sebastian Bach is a jealously guarded possession, and judgments of any new Bach performer are sharply critical, especially if the performer is a foreigner. But last week a Munich audience applauded a harpsichord recital played by a middle-aged American housewife. As Virginia Pleasants performed Bach's French Overture and a Rameau suite, cognoscenti listened attentively, demanded seven curtain calls...
They all sing La Vie En Rose, and they all sing of an unreal Paris, but their styles are as different as a hangover at the Ritz is from a morning-after brandy in St. Germain des Prés. Blonde Vicky Autier, one of the three French singers who seem to have taken over Manhattan night life, appears at the St. Regis Maisonette in a $1,000 spangled black velvet gown, and she sings the song with gay sophistication. Blonder Lilo bounces about the Plaza's Persian Room in brief white tights, and sings La Vie with brassy...