Word: frisian
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...started out by assiduously putting up signs, painting lines and devising new traffic-calming projects. One of his early specialties was to place giant flowerpots in the road to make drivers hit the brakes. But in 1982, Monderman risked a bolder approach, redesigning the street layout of car-clogged Frisian towns and villages. He began by removing the road signs, traffic lights and surface markings, then set about eliminating the curb between the sidewalk and the highway. "My theory," said Monderman, at a Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) summit in London last November, "was if you want people to behave...
With its splendid hoard of half a million words, the Oxford English Dictionary is the central bank of the language -a trove of Latinate abstractions. Old Frisian or Old French oddments, fubsy eloquences of Middle English and exotic intrusions from the Arabic. It contains a million and a half quotations to show the historical progress of language, the way its vocabularies have stirred, matured in meaning and eventually decayed. But the logomaniac's great joy in the O.E.D. is to wander through it looking for the glint of old coins: sippet, maumetry, floscule, gimmer, the wonderfully dark deathbird...
...aging Emil Nolde became the only major German expressionist to join the Nazi Party. Much good it did him. For all his Frisian peasant conservatism, the Nazis soon called him a "degenerate" modern artist and stripped his works from German museums. In 1941, he was forbidden to sell his art or even to paint. At 73, Nolde retreated from Berlin to his summer home in Seebull, not far from his birthplace on the North Sea coast-but he did not stop painting. To his diary he revealed: "I still hold my head high, and only to you, my little pictures...
...more than all the first editions in Houghton. Since 1948 he has taken a few minutes at the end of each day to sift through the five or six dozen jackets accumulated for him by Widener's catalog department, where he works as a specialist in Dutch, African, and Frisian books. About ten per cent of these jackets escape immediate oblivion and go to his home for more critical scrutiny. Since Harvard College Librarian Keyes D. Metcalf decided in 1948 to preserve only the works of "outstanding and recognized artists" for the Harvard collection, Kleist must dig into reference books...
...Hassel's unusual first names are of archaic Frisian origin and often encountered in North Germany. Uwe (pronounced oo-vuh) is similar to Oswald, while Kai (rhymes with sky) is a near-perfect name for a German politician. It means: "One who is dangerous to his enemy...