Word: gallic
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Their tactics were exquisitely Gallic. Charles showed up at the embassy with Cynthia one night and, rustling a few dollar bills, whispered to the understanding watchman that Mme. Brousse was suspicious of their liaison (she was, indeed, and later divorced him). The embassy, Brousse explained to the guard, was the only place where he and his girl could rendezvous, and they soon became regular visitors. On the night they planned to lift the code, with the help of a safebreaker called the Georgia Cracker, they put the watchman to sleep with drugged champagne, only to find that the locks were...
Guillermou has a certain point: words are themselves ideas that shape a people's self-image. French purists are thus aghast at the eat-and-run tone of le snack-bar as opposed to the civilized Gallic pace of le cafe. The Franglais word teen-ager is rebellious worlds apart from the dutiful jeune fille. The traitorous notion that "American is the only living language," cries Linguist Etiemble, will lead straight to what he calls, in ironic Franglais, "I' American way of life...
Naked Autumn. "People go stale after ten years," says a bored French wife, languishing in the country with her equally bored husband. Such is the ambivalence of married love that the couple's passion has long since turned to hate and to Gallic variations on the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? theme -their favorite happens to be a form of boudoir bingo that has already alienated the wife's best friend and driven the husband's auto-racing teammate to suicide. This time out, they notice a lissome young schoolteacher. The wife befriends the girl...
...Down. Sure enough, Precedential Adviser Shaw has recorded some fascinating shifts, additions and subtractions, and they are now de rigueur. That is because "Gallic" Shaw is the Lady Umpire of the Social Game. She is 59, the daughter of a now-deceased social secretary who first started the Green Book series back in 1930, and she knows her social shallots. Her list, she says, comprises "important people from the social or civic angle and old blue-bloods-people who make the wheels go around in Washington...
...real possibility of toxic consequence has little effect on the millions of Frenchmen who cannot resist aller aux champignons-tramping into the woods for mushrooms when the delicacies sprout, with particular abundance, during the first turning of the leaves. Last week, thanks to a wretchedly wet summer, the Gallic countryside was laden with a bumper crop-and some 45 persons were dead of mushroom poisoning. Countless others lay ill at home or in hospitals...