Word: frenchman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...past decade has brought a renaissance. Partly it's been spurred by domestic growth: though historically not big wine consumers, Australians now drink an average of 26 bottles of table wine a year--more than any other English-speaking nation, although less than a third of the average Frenchman's needs. But the real growth has come overseas, where inexpensive (less than $30) Australian wines are hailed for richness, approachability and reliability--characteristics that put them on a footing with good French wine. "Australia is now seen as a credible dinner-party wine," says Simon Farr, a director of Bibendum...
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...
...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...