Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...used to be that half the passengers on the Metro wore the Legion of Honor," crack Parisians. "Now the only ones who still bother to wear it are the conductors." Today, some 300,000 Frenchmen and several thousand foreigners are entitled to the Legion's lapel emblem, and Charles de Gaulle, who as President of France is Grand Master of the Legion, is anxious to make the list more exclusive. De Gaulle has recently approved a decree reducing the number of annual awards by 20%. Through normal attrition, the government hopes the Legion will have dwindled...
Calling for drastic fines against Américanolatres (America worshipers), Etiemble estimates that Frenchmen soft on English have allowed 5,000 common Anglicisms (and 30,000 technical ones) to divide Gaul. The august French Academy is so alarmed that it has decided to "unleash an offensive in favor of the defense of the French language." Mounting the barricades, the academy's dictionary commission will prepare a blacklist of "foreign" words that are impropres à la langue...
...Communist East Europe, commissars and cops do it. In Rome and Madrid, moppets in dancing class do it. Frenchmen perform the ritual with sinuous grace, Spaniards smackingly, Germans with a click of the heels. However widely their techniques may vary, Europeans from Barcelona to Bialystok in recent years have taken to hand kissing with fervor and frequency unmatched in their history. After World War II, the custom seemed in decline. But today, men of virtually every class and calling on the Continent dive for distaff knuckles as assiduously, if not always so expertly, as do the courtiers in a Lehar...
...classic respect for pure science and its fondness for academic titles, Europe was long the greatest repository of research for the world's industries. But its crown has slipped since World War II. Of 40,000 patents granted in France last year, only 16,000 went to Frenchmen and the rest to foreigners, notably Americans. The West Germans, by latest count, spend $111 million a year more in fees to use foreign licenses than they collect from their own licenses abroad. Italy's University of Pavia found that less than one-third of 965 companies it surveyed engaged...
Ever since France ceded Canada to Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French-speaking province of Quebec has felt itself unhappily isolated. Québecois complain that they are treated as second-class citizens by the English-speaking Canadians. As for Frenchmen, when they noticed Quebec at all, they tended to regard it as a chilly place populated by peasants who spoke an unforgivable French...