Word: frenched
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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REASON Like Britain, France has been stung by incidents with tainted food. Its attitude is colored by hostility to U.S. imports and a desire to protect French farmers...
...incubator for pictorial grandeur, as in the history pieces of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Its sexual rhetoric--think of Boucher's pink and frothy shepherdesses--was peerless. Since the reign of Louis XIV, whose minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had striven to connect the visual arts to the very essence of French gloire, every kind of official discourse had flourished in French painting and sculpture, as it did in the arts of Italy. But unofficial life--the relatively ordinary pleasures and utterances of the bourgeois center, the common protein of French society--did not as yet have its painter laureate...
Chardin became that man. There was nothing extraordinary about his career except the beauty of the works it produced. His field of social vision was narrow. But by painting what he knew, neither more nor less, he became the standard-bearer of visual truth to a generation of French intellectuals, the Encyclopedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot. To them, Chardin's refusal of the highfalutin theme seemed exemplary. He showed that a jar of apricots on a table could be just as important and freighted with meaning as a battle scene in an epic of Alexander, the impregnation...
...proportion of young French, German and Scandinavian hikers is high on the trail, most Americans preferring the video version, so it's a foreign-exchange experience. You meet sinewy, tanned, multilingual Europeans striding purposefully upward, talking, one assumes, about man's fate and the future of culture and such things. And you see the occasional large, pathetic, flabby American sitting on a rock and gasping for breath, sweating off the Big Macs, thinking about coronary occlusion. There are moral fables everywhere you look. Despicable, whiny teenagers slouch along, and valiant geezers pass them. It's Pilgrim's Progress in real...
...name DivX--the official spelling is DivX;-), with a winky smiley face--is geek gallows humor. It's named after a home-video format that died an ignominious and expensive death last year. The new DivX, developed by French hackers, turns theatrical movies into relatively small computer files that can be transferred over the Internet. To do this, the movie is copied off an ordinary DVD using a program called DeCSS. (The legal status of DeCSS is a gray area, to put it mildly; one of its distributors is currently in court for violating copyright law.) In the next step...