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John Brown While a desk officer for France when I first joined USIA in the early 80s, one of my assignments at the agency's headquarters in Washington was to read cables from Paris. I was struck in these missives by the frequent reference to "Emboff." Boy, I told myself (I studied Russian history in grad school), that son of an Americanized Russian emigre family (which, I suspected, must have spent time in France [the "ff" suggests a "French" transliteration of the Russian "в"]) sure is making a splash in the City of Light. It took me several weeks to figure out that Emboff was an abbreviation for "Embassy officer" ... Live and learn ...
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