Word: du
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...just a crude exploratory gambit along the lines of "Hiya, babe, you wanna . . . ?" Here too some moral Rubicon has been crossed. Intimacy in a public setting is not just "inappropriate," in the prissy, yuppie sense. It can be deeply insulting, which is why a misapplied tu in French or du in German can be a fighting word. When we leave our homes to go to work, we assume an impersonal role like "teacher," "secretary" or "judge." We may even don a special costume (black robes, skirted suit) to get the point across: "This is the public me -- not the mommy...
...painful detail, Kozol describes such inner-city schools as Morris High in the South Bronx, where water cascades down the stairways when it rains, and Chicago's Du Sable High, where the chemistry teacher uses a popcorn popper as a Bunsen burner. Kozol juxtaposes these images with descriptions of the luxurious facilities in nearby wealthy suburbs like Winnetka, north of Chicago. Its New Trier High has, among other things, seven gyms, rooms for fencing, wrestling and dance instruction, and an Olympic-size pool...
...story is much the same elsewhere in Europe. Alpine forests in Austria and Switzerland have been denuded to make way for ski runs and cable cars. For the Conservatoire du Littoral, the French agency charged with preserving the Mediterranean coastline, the grossly overdeveloped French Riviera is the sorriest example of tourism gone awry. Not only has the coastline been ravaged by urbanization and the sea severely polluted, but tourism was down 30% last year from 1989. Pollution and overcrowding also figured in a similar drop in tourist revenues in Spain...
Conservationists and local residents have managed to stop some developments. Last summer scores of people took to France's Gardon River in canoes to protest a government project that would have brought motorized trains, parking lots, a museum and even a shopping arcade close to the historic Pont du Gard, a 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct near Remoulins. The Pont already draws more than 2 million visitors a year. Historians, environmentalists and locals also joined forces against a commercial project planned for Chambord, one of the most illustrious of the Loire Valley chateaus. The castle was scheduled to become...
...lumiere du monde lost its way? Not yet, certainly. If the home of the Rights of Man could absorb one-third of its population growth by way of immigration between 1946 and 1982, its cherished identity seems rather safe. After all, 30 years ago, at the Fifth Republic's outset, the living embodiments of sophisticated Frenchness to much of the world were the film stars Yves Montand and Simone Signoret -- the former a native Italian from a town near Florence, the latter born in Germany to an Austrian-Polish-Jew ish father. As Cyrano himself might have crowed...