Showing posts with label french. Show all posts
Showing posts with label french. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

#51

bete noire \bet-NWAHR\, noun:
Something or someone particularly detested or avoided; a bugbear.

Even more regrettable, as far as Dame Edna is concerned, is the presence of her old bete noire, the extravagantly disgusting Sir Les Patterson.
-- "The Dame's New Man", Daily Telegraph, April 18, 1998

Never an exceptional student, Andrews somehow managed to navigate the academy's rigorous courses with satisfactory grades, though all forms of mathematics were agonizing to him, remaining what he called his "bete noire" throughout life.
-- Charles Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions


BĂȘte noire is French for "black beast."



Thursday, September 13, 2007

#33

roue \roo-AY\, noun:
A man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure; a debauchee; a rake.

I spent some time with Desmond, an old roue who was recovering from a lifetime of excesses in a village near Fontainebleau.
-- Roger Scruton, "Purely medicinal", New Statesman, October 15, 2001

She caught the eye of New York aristocrat Gouverneur Morris, ex-U.S. Minister to France, a one-legged cosmopolitan roue. (Rumor had it that a jealous husband had shot Morris's leg off.)
-- Bill Kauffman, "Unwise Passions", American Enterprise, January 2001

Yet he acted the roue to the end, carrying on an intimate liaison with a girl who worked at the asylum -- he was 74, she was 17.
-- Rex Roberts, "Write Stuff", Insight on the News, December 11, 2000


Roue comes from French, from the past participle of rouer, "to break upon the wheel" (from the feeling that a roue deserves such a punishment), ultimately from Latin rota, "wheel."

--------

roux [roo] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation,
–noun
a cooked mixture of butter or other fat and flour used to thicken sauces, soups, etc.

[Origin: 1805–15; < F (beurre) roux brown (butter) < L russus red-brown, red-haired, akin to ruber red]

-------


Roux (r) Pronunciation Key
French bacteriologist who assisted Louis Pasteur on most of his major discoveries. Later, working with Alexandre Yersin, he showed that the symptoms of diphtheria are caused by a lethal toxin produced by the diphtheria bacillus. Roux carried out early work on the rabies vaccine and directed the first tests of the diphtheria antitoxin.