Word: gallicisms
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When a Frenchman, over his hot brioches and chocolate, unfolds his morning paper to stare at gaping columns of white space, he shrugs and murmurs philosophically : "Anastasie!" A haggard, black-gowned, crotchety old maid, armed with an immense pair of shears, Anastasie is a characteristic creation of Gallic wit. She personifies the tightlipped, prudish silence clamped on the French press in wartime...
France has a technique logical, whimsical, Gallic. When the Germans called France Britain's Rin-Tin-Tin, the French lost little time getting out a story that France's real Rin-Tin-Tin, a trained police dog, had indeed enlisted with his master in the French Army. Paris-Mondial spent much air time twitting Germany on the Moscow deal, hinting at a sort of diplomatic cuckoldry with the Soviets reaping the joys of Germany's conquest...
...attracted his first large audiences when, aged 20, he joined the 350th Field Artillery and banged his way from Camp Dix to France and back. On the strictly military phase of his service with the 350th, The Lion's recollections sound like a blend of Caesar's Gallic Wars and Alice in Wonderland. "Very few soldiers volunteered to go up to the front and fire a French 75," he declares, "and of those who did-few returned. The Lion stayed up at the front 33 days without relief, scoring several direct hits on the enemy. As a result...
...discovery of the tomb of great Caesar's ghost writer, one Aulus Hirtius. ... It is more than probable that Hirtius wrote some portion of Caesar's Commentaries, dividing with Oppius, another ghost writer of that day, the credit for authorship of the eighth book of the Gallic Wars...
...thing, the show has a lot of dependable talent: the amusing, if less than Bea-Lillie, drollness of Luella Gear; the Gallic, if less than Maurice-Chevalier, charm of Jean Sablon; the dazed, middle-aged prankishness of Bobby Clark ("I'm Robert the Roue of Reading, Pa."); the borderline sanity of Abbott & Costello; the magic bartending of "Think a Drink" Hoffman, who turns water into not only wine, but dry Martinis, Pink Ladys and piping hot coffee...