Word: mots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
When slim Filipino Nurse Pet Duruin arrived in Viet Nam, the first Vietnamese words she learned were: "Mot ngay ba vien," meaning "one tablet three times a day." Nurse Duruin repeated this phrase as often as 200 times a day as she passed out quinine and sulfa pills from her own thin, bronzed hand to the equally bronzed but thinner hands of the wretched refugees streaming in from the Communist north. For this was October 1954, following the invasion debacle that ended with the surrender of Dienbienphu to the Reds...
...other circles, merde is not a dirty word by any means, but a form of farewell and best wishes considered far more profound and more affectionate than other, more ordinary phrases. It has the special distinction of being called "the five-letter word." It is also called the mot de Cambronne because General Cam-bronne, when asked to surrender to the British at Waterloo, anticipated America's General McCauliffe by some 132 years and replied: "Merde...