Meaning
Originally the word came from the kind of terrain in which the armed resistance groups hid, the type of high ground in southeastern France covered with scrub growth. Although strictly meaning thicket, maquis could be roughly translated as "the bush".
Members of those bands were called maquisards. The term became an honorific that meant "armed resistance fighter". The Maquis have come to symbolize the French Resistance. They helped British agents in sabotage, spying, and misinformation.
Read more about this topic: Maquis (World War II)
Famous quotes containing the word meaning:
“A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, and yet recurring inevitably, without a finale in nothingness—”eternal recurrence.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)