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The Young Lions vocabulary

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Caen: tags: [geography]

► definition

Definition:

a commune in northern France, with a population of about 400,000 inhabitants. It is famous for its limestone.
Much of the city was destroyed during the Battle of Normandy in 1944

^{map: by OpenStreetMap®, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license}
^{https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/}
^{https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/149197#map=7/49.486/-0.461}

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Uses:

Ahead of them stretched the city of Caen. The British had been trying to take it for a month, and after looking at it for a moment, you wondered why they had been so anxious. Walls were standing, but few houses.

Irwin Shaw. The Young Lions, p.490 (1948)

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“There were quite a few of the Seaforths and Camerons through the field hospital at Amiens, and then a bit later, after Caen, we had a lot of the Gordons. Nice chaps, most of them. Very stoic about things generally, but terrible cowards about injections.”

Diana Gabaldon. Outlander (1991)

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they were composed of eminent persons from the departmental capitals of that region of France, a chief magistrate from Caen, a leader of the Cherbourg bar, a big solicitor from Le Mans, who annually, when the holidays came round,

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 2]

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London's ancient Temple Church was constructed entirely of Caen Stone*.

Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code, p343 (2007)

^{* A cream-colored limestone for building, found near Caen, France. It is a freestone, thus suitable for carving}