Word: frenchmen
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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...
...allegedly turned the Legion down. Offered the medal in lieu of payment for his famed requiem commissioned by the government, Composer Hector Berlioz snorted: "To hell with your Legion of Honor. I want my money." But a refusal cannot be worn in a buttonhole, and thousands of other Frenchmen still openly court the award...
...learn" is about to supplant "fight, fight, fight" on U.S. campuses. From Anchors Aweigh to All Hail Alaska, the college song is still uniquely American. Britons save their tears for school songs like Harrow's Forty Years On. Oxbridge has s no official songs whatever. Germans I and Frenchmen sing of beer and wine...
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...