Word: mots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Fifty years on, the name Edsel remains shorthand for hubris and collapse, a mal mot of capitalism, right up there with New Coke, Betamax and Pets.com Except that Edsel was a real person and a pretty good one at that. On this, the anniversary of his maligning, it feels like somebody ought...
...writer of letters and thank-you notes, which always appeared in your mailbox written in her own hand. When she had to send out numerous letters all at once, which had to be typewritten, she never failed to add her name and yours in her handwriting, with a bon mot at the end. She also had a sparkling sense of humor. She was delighted, for example, in 1981, when the Bronx Zoo, one of the great institutions she supported, named a newborn baby elephant after her. It was a boy, so they called it Astor...
...version of hangman, creating the most successful game show in TV history, Wheel of Fortune. As usual, his involvement with the show was total; friends used to tell of being at dinner parties with Merv, where he'd stop the conversation whenever he heard a particular clich? or bon mot - another hidden phrase for Wheel of Fortune, he'd exclaim. When he died, he was in the midst of creating a new game show, Crosswords...
...theocons’ basic premise is wrong: Demography isn’t destiny. In fact, the phrase is nothing but a meaningless platitude, an intellectual dilettante’s bon mot. The weight of population didn’t enable Russia to dominate Europe—instead the Tsar’s kingdom was long dominated by puny Sweden—and didn’t prevent Britain from defeating China or conquering India...
...quote it. "Look at Landsman," he writes, "one shirttail hanging out, snow-dusted porkpie knocked to the left, coat hooked to a thumb over his shoulder. Hanging on to a sky-blue cafeteria ticket as if it's the strap keeping him on his feet." There's hardly a mot here that's not juste. Likewise, a cartoon dog evokes "the obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy...