Word: frenchman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lundy's knowledge of sea lore and history is rich, his pace perfect, his intelligence full of energy. He differentiates each sailor with a novelist's touch. When Frenchman Raphael Dinelli's Algimouss capsized in a storm in the Southern Ocean, he managed to get on top of the inverted hull and cling there. The story of his rescue by his English competitor Pete Goss--who bravely turned back into the teeth of a force-10 gale and beat to windward until he located Dinelli--is one of those anecdotes of miracle that can be enacted only in an intense...
...been written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than 12,000 "ghost soldiers"--nonexistent employees--have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys...
Perhaps instead of turning to Geraldo Rivera when tragedy strikes, we might consider turning to a Frenchman whose keen insights into America upon his visit in the mid-1800s still resonate today. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Volume Two of Democracy in America, writes of the exact instinct which stirs our love of instant explanation. Americans, he wrote, have "an unrestrained passion for generalizations," which is rooted in our democratic instincts. Believing that all humans are fundamentally alike, the democrat has "an ardent and often blind passion of the human spirit to discover common rules for everything" and seeks "to explain...
...sailor, explorer, inventor, best-selling author, prizewinning filmmaker, passionate environmentalist and canny businessman. Instantly recognizable by his pipe, red cap and gaunt silhouette, Jacques-Yves Cousteau--a.k.a. "Captain Planet"--was arguably the century's best known, most popular Frenchman. For generations of scuba divers--and millions of armchair explorers--he created a crystal-clear window for the unseen world beneath the waves...
...Frenchman, the psychologist Alfred Binet, published the first standardized test of human intelligence in 1905. But it was an American, Lewis Terman, a psychology professor at Stanford, who thought to divide a test taker's "mental age," as revealed by that score, by his or her chronological age to derive a number that he called the "intelligence quotient," or IQ. It would be hard to think of a pop-scientific coinage that has had a greater impact on the way people think about themselves and others...