Word: jourdaine
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...between art and entertainment is often indistinct, and never more so than in musical theater. We tend to think of opera, the sung play, as the pinnacle of a form whose lower manifestations include the Viennese operetta and the Broadway show. But such rigid categorizing is myopic. Like M. Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, even composers with the most commercial motives may turn out to have been writing memorable, lasting scores. Two of the most electrifying operas...
Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who discovered to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life, New Yorkers have learned that their ordinary tap water deserves an appellation controlee label...
Like Moliere's M. Jourdain, who in middle age found to his delight that he had been speaking prose all his life, a huge number of Americans are raptly if belatedly discovering that they are scions. Everyone-not just Anthony Dupuy Crustworthy IV-has ancestors and, with time, patience and luck, can trace a pedigree and track his progenitors back to Minsk or Marseille, the Isle of Wjght or at least Ellis Island...
...MEMORIAL essay, published some months after Merleau-Ponty died, Sartre wrote that "[Merleau-Ponty] showed me that I was making History in the same way that M. Jourdain was speaking prose." ( Situations, p. 176) But to know that we are making history all the time is not yet to know how we are making it, day by day, and how we are to live with such knowledge. When Merleau-Ponty reproached Trotsky for an incomplete attention to "the compromises of everyday history," he was in part recording our need to be awakened to "the importance of daily events and action...
...also promised them an Armageddon with a postscript of a land of "milk and honey" reserved exclusively for red men, of course. The result was gunpowder, chaos and tragedy for those who tried to hurry Armageddon, and those who maintained quiet hopes must still be waiting. Spencer C. D. Jourdain...