Word: gallicisms
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Reporting on the U.S. of the early 1830s as seen through his shrewd Gallic eyes, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans tended in their attitude toward the arts to "put the real in place of the ideal." That has always been true of the interior of the White House. First occupied in 1800, when the nation was still in its raw infancy, when Washington, D.C., was a muddy village with a few thousand inhabitants, the White House has, through the changing decades, served its practical functions as residence and office for the President. What was neglected was the ideal...
...more dissimilar. "Dev," the aloof, magnetic revolutionary with a martyr's face and mystic's mind, was the sort of leader whom the Irish have adored in every age. Sean Lemass, a reticent, pragmatic planner called "The Quiet Man," is by temperament and ancestry more Gallic than Gaelic, and represents a wholly new species of leadership for Ireland...
Swart, frog-faced Pierre Laval had the look of a man born to play a horrid role. And in the popular Gallic fairy tale that still passes for the history of France during World War II, he has always made an ideal ogre-a sinister greasy eminence who bamboozled the National Assembly into capitulating in 1940 and dragged Marianne in the muck by collaborating with Germany. When gallant Charles de Gaulle returned to slay this monster and (with some small American help) deliver France from thralldom, his countrymen threw Laval into a traitor's grave, hoping that five years...
...December. After all, six of the seven "judges" were members of the National Assembly that Dia had tried to dissolve by force during the abortive coup. They just might be a little prejudiced. But when the proceedings began, the court was careful to observe all the flowery decorum of Gallic justice. The presiding judge was resplendent in ermine-trimmed long red robes, and sat listening with calm dignity. Moreover, Dia was not even charged with "plotting," only with the more vague "acting against the internal security of the state." Taking the floor in his defense, Dia argued that...
...Euromart, the Eurodollar and the Eurochick (the rising class of smart young working girls), a French firm with the un-Gallic name of Machines Bull has just added another contribution: the Eu-rocheck. Ready to switch to the magnetic-ink system of automatic checking now spreading throughout the U.S., European nations have been looking around for the best system. To many, it seemed that the firm likeliest to walk away with the biggest fistful of orders was IBM, whose sales in France alone were up 41% last year. But scrappy Machines Bull has soundly tweaked the giant's nose...