Word of the Day

Thursday December 24, 2009

martinet [mar-t'n-ET]

noun

A strict disciplinarian.
One who lays stress on a rigid adherence to the details of or to forms and fixed methods.

Take Lost in Yonkers, his Pulitzer Prize winner from 1991, currently receiving an exemplary production at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. Sure, there are plenty of laughs in this tale of a martinet German-American grandmother, the grown children she emotionally damaged and the two young grandchildren who are forced by dire circumstances to live with her in the title New York suburb during World War II.

Hap Ernstein, "LAUGHS NOT 'LOST,'BUT DRAMA KEY", Palm Beach Post, Dec 6, 2009
The HBO film "RKO 281" (1999), written by John Logan ("The Aviator") and directed by Benjamin Ross, about the making of "Citizen Kane," synthesizes these personas -- Welles as giant and Welles as self-destructive martinet -- making the now-familiar argument that the director, no less than his ostensible subject William Randolph Hearst (played by James Cromwell), was a Kane-esque figure of towering contradictions. Liev Schreiber's Welles is a boy wonder in embryo, studying the craft of filmmaking with "Kane" mentors like screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland.

Saul Austerlitz, "The characterizing of Orson Welles; He's been dead for almost 25 years, but the director-actor keeps popping up in others' films", Los Angeles Times, Nov 29, 2009
She wound the old martinet round her finger, subdued her rampant Americanism in his society, and amused herself sowing the seeds of rebellion in the minds of "those poor Niebuhr girls.

Gertrude Atherton (1857 - 1948) An American writer. The White Morning (1918)

Origin of the Word

Martinet, approximately 1676, derives from Colonel Jean Martinet a drillmaster of the French army during the reign of Louis XIV known for his system of strict discipline.