martinet

Van Zweden, in turn, was a martinet specialist in the standards who seemed appealing as an about-face from Gilbert, less electric in the core repertory.

That the legendary anti-interventionist Taft supported a vain martinet whose tirades included lobbying for nuclear war suggests he might have been less than a rock-solid man of principle.

But Laws isn’t just a martinet, or the avatar of a brutal institution.

As are the old-fashioned words — like “martinet,” “popinjay” and “annealed” — that Galloway sprinkles through the text, the way Leigh strewed the beloved posies from her various country estates.

Purge school boards of the sort of bluenose martinet who thinks you should teach the Holocaust — the Holocaust! — without painful words and images.