Word: urbain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Modern scientific meteorology was founded on the telegraph, with an assist from the Crimean War. On Nov. 14, 1854, a violent storm sank key vessels of a Franco-British fleet in Balaklava harbor. At the request of the French Minister of War, the famed Astronomer Urbain Le Verrier studied the storm and reported that it could have been tracked across Europe by the new-fangled telegraph. Soon after his report sank in, most of Europe (and later the U.S.) had a telegraphic storm-warning service...
...what it meant he managed to get through accrete. Other contestants were not so lucky: mellifluous lost an "1," fenestrate got a "phi," and molybdenum came out moldinum. By the time Bill was getting apocalypse, Pharisaical and littoral, the auditorium was already ringing with misspelled words (baubal, glatial, pavillion, urbain, annoble). Finally, the contest was narrowed down to three...
Rash Priest. Father Urbain Grandier, the center of the disturbance, looked for all the world like "a fleshier, not unamiable and only slightly less intelligent Mephistopheles in clerical fancy dress." Since his arrival at Loudun in 1617, he had fully exploited his devilish good looks. He not only made himself free with scullery trulls and upstairs maids; he also abused the confessional and other sacred precincts, it was said, with docile ladies of the parish. He had even taken a rich "wife," though his enemies had difficulty in proving it, because Grandier himself had served as both priest and bridegroom...