Martinet
Entry #2 in Dr. Waffle's Lexical Lucubrations
This is the second in a new weekly series of micro-essays using weird, wild, and wonderful words from Dr. Waffle’s venerable list.
martinet, n.
Originally: a person who leads others in military drill. Later: a military or naval officer who is especially concerned with strictness of discipline; (gen.) a rigid, inflexible, or merciless disciplinarian.
< the name of Jean Martinet (d. 1672), French soldier, whose attention to drill and training as Inspector-General of the infantry helped to shape the regular army of Louis XIV.
The Good Teachers
I often natter on about the excellent public education I was lucky enough to receive—thanks to the high property taxes in the wealthy suburb in which I grew up. But when I think back on the teachers who had the greatest influence on me, I am struck by the fact that they were all pretty strict disciplinarians. Mrs. Cadwallader, who once threw a copy of Moll Flanders directly at the head of a student who hadn’t done the reading (it was a paperback—but still). Mr. Pitt, my high school physics teacher who made us memorize the response that Annapolis cadets must utter when asked the time (“The inner workings of my chronometer are not in accord with the great sidereal movements by which all time is commonly measured”). But the greatest martinet of them all has to be Mr. Rickards, my fifth-grade algebra teacher. Mr. Rickards would call students to the blackboard and make them work out problems in real time, in front of the entire class; if you had chronic stage fright and were unable to think clearly while clutching a damp piece of chalk in front of your compeers, well, you were just out of luck. But Mr. Rickards was also fond of announcing periodically that “girls are not good at math” and any young woman thus paralyzed at the chalkboard was told she had better just sit down and ride out the time until home ec class.
Thank you, Mr. Rickards. I remember you.
YOUR HOMEWORK: Go use “martinet” in the wild, then report back here in the comments!
Damn you, Mr. Rickards!