Haitain* (for Haitian*)

The other night on a TV crime show, the victim was said to have "baby doe eyes." This struck me as another one of those conflated idioms I've written about here before: doe-eyed, baby doll, baby blues, etc. The usage was a bit disconcerting at first, but you got the general idea and in a small way it actually made the sad story just that much more poignant. Speaking of murderers, Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, the longtime Haitian dictator, passed away earlier this month as well. He succeeded his father, François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, at age 19, making him the youngest president in the world. He ruled Haiti from 1971 till 1986 when his reign was finally overthrown. After creating a vicious state militia, trafficking in illegal drugs, and selling the body parts of his countrymen in order to support his lavish lifestyle, Baby Doc was accused of the "zombification" of Haiti. Duvalier returned from France in 2011, after a nearly 20-year self-imposed time-out for bad behavior, whereupon he was promptly spanked with charges of embezzlement, abuse of power, and corruption. (The statute of limitations had run out on his most horrific crimes against humanity.) There were a lot of people still hatin' on this Haitian in 2014, though there were only two cases of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 21 in WorldCat.

(Photograph showing the now-deceased Jean-Claude Duvalier and his then wife, Michele, fleeing Haiti, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid