Word: mot
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...Mot. One of the principal elsewheres is the federal capital of Ottawa, where a French-speaking civil servant who receives a letter in French must send it to a translation bureau to be put into English. Even French-speaking civil servants are required to communicate with each other in English; it simplifies filing...
...seem like so much unfinished business. As writers, women are usually mistresses of microcosm: their themes may not be large, but their literary housekeeping is unassailable-the commas properly placed, the exact word found to match an idea or thing. One of the better U.S. dispensers of this feminine mot justice is Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife of Poet Robert Lowell. Judging by this first collection of her essays and book reviews-most of them fugitives from oblivion in Partisan Review-she is also an artist in aphorism who deserves, at her best, comparison with Mary McCarthy or Virginia Woolf...
...teacher, Mendenhall is not a prolific publisher. One of his big contributions to Yale's history department: development (along with his colleagues) of the "problem method," which stresses use of original sources instead of historical texts. Sample Mendenhall problem, fed to one class of freshmen: was the famous mot de Cam-bronne that French General Pierre Cam-bronne uttered near the end of the Battle of Waterloo really "The old guard dies, but never surrenders"-or was it simply "Merde!"? The frosh dutifully turned up evidence to back both mots...
...gets down to words, matters are less exhilarating. Using foreign words -jabbering in French, German, Russian, Yiddish, gibberish-he is fun the first five or six times. But using English words-though there are happy Coward glints and phrasings and intonations-he seems to be neither the hilarious mot juste expert nor the acid-throwing enfant terrible. There are false-tooth marks at best, and not too many of those...
...that in the fall of 1914 Eugene O'Neill entered Harvard and enrolled in English 47. He was not a literary man, a biographer notes. He sought more meanings and purposes than the mot juste. Cambridge was strange...