Word: witnessing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even if these phrases were the nastiest bomb mots on earth, who'd want a civilization without frequent hits of wicked wit? The real reason modular meanness grates isn't the meanness--it's the modularness...
...Americanisms is only the tip of France's long-standing obsession with language. In the 18th-century court portrayed in "Ridicule," the skillful manipulation of language is the sole means of gaining and keeping social status. The world of Versailles is shaped by what they refer to as "wit." Lest one believe that this wit is based on the crass premise of merely producing amusement, one French noble dismisses disdainfully the "hew-mah" of the English as being far inferior to French wit. The use of wit is sadistic, funny only if you enjoy seeing people being cut down with...
...increasing involvement in the court. This also means involvement with the unofficial reigning queen of the court, the widow de Blayac (Fanny Ardant). The widow de Blayac is almost a spiritual twin of Dangerous Liaisons' calculating Marquise de Merteuil. Both of them rule with Machiavellian minds and Voltairian wits. She is the master player that Gregoire has to confront from whom he learns to play the game of seduction as well as the game of wit...
...deaf-mutes are at first an object of ridicule for the courtiers. After all, since they can't speak, they are necessarily excluded from the routine exchanges of quips that form the backbone of court life. But as the scene progresses, the deaf-mutes respond with their own wit, in their own language, with "plays on signs" that the court cannot understand, because they in their turn are excluded by language...
...wavers gently during a love scene, in accordance with the tenderness of the moment. It also plunges through fields and over water for a flight to the countryside. Or it remains breathlessly still and grave for a duel, one of the sober possible endings to this game of wit...