Word: martinet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Agony & Ambition. In Wolfe at Quebec, Historian Hibbert penetrates the fog of hero worship to describe the soldier as he really was-a gangly, slack-chinned, irascible young man in constant pain from a kidney disease. Commissioned at 14, James Wolfe had earned a reputation as a priggish martinet who scorned wining and wenching but relished the meanest chores in his scramble for rank. He had fought well in Flanders against the French, and William Pitt the Elder recommended the stiff-necked young major general to run the siege of Quebec, France's major stronghold in America...
Such proceedings naturally grated against Quincy's rigid ethics. He felt that the only cure would be suitable discipline for the offending undergraduates--but his clamping down produced even greater disorder. Quincy became a martinet, the "Tiberius" of the College. "His policy toward the students, an alternate cuffing and caressing, ended in making him the most unpopular President in Harvard history since Hoar," wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Quincy knew what was right--the Puritan code of upright moral behavior--and attempted to impose this upon the naturally unwilling student body...
...hatred of a young army recruit for his martinet captain in the dusty Pacific town garrison of Portoviejo caused the rioting that put Ecuador under martial law and killed at least 37 people...
...penny revolutionism which went no further than bravado in the face of a Cossack whip and its blow on the back of a padded coat." He studied law briefly at Moscow, then enrolled as a philosophy major in Germany's University of Marburg under a pudgy intellectual martinet, Professor Hermann Cohen, a disciple of Hegel and Kant. In the Gothic-fairy-tale mountain town of Marburg, with its steeply sloping streets and medieval gables, his first serious love came to 18-year-old Boris Pasternak. When the girl turned down his offer of marriage, "[I found] my face...
...words did not mean that German militarism is stirring again: the new General Staff college is rising in Hamburg, historically one of the least martial-minded of German cities. And the college's chief is no monocled martinet such as the late great General Hans von Seeckt, who built the Reichswehr after Versailles, but an infantryman who rose to major general's rank fighting on the Eastern Front. Yet there are signs that the postwar German attitude toward the military is changing...