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He was just being abraxive.



TEd
#138720 02/06/05 12:03 AM
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And those who do study history are doomed to recognize that they are repeating it.

True, but we can never be sure of the ending.

One of Winston Churchill's books was titled "The Hinge of Fate", as I recall.

Who can anticipate the hinge of fate?

From uninterrupted defeat to almost unbroken success: a year when Rommel is gradually thrown back in North Africa, and in the Pacific the tide turns.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/
0395410584/103-5077255-8686237


"Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe;/ The enemy increaseth every day;/ We, at the height, are ready to decline./ There is a tide in the affairs of men,/ Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/ Omitted, all the voyage of their life/ Is bound in shallows and in miseries./ On such a full sea are we now afloat... (4.3.215-222)."

http://www.willamette.edu/~blong/ShakeJC/TheTide.html

#138721 02/06/05 02:35 AM
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From Dr. Bill [wwh] - presumably in reference to Dali's fish, but I'm not sure.

stinking sprats
I had to look up definition of this.
A small fish in herring family, processed like a sardine.
I remember it only from nursery rhyme:

Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
So betwixt them both you see
They licked the platter clean.




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tsuwm Offline OP
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actually, he refers to this, in Q&A:

1711 -- Johnathan Swift notes the contents of London's gutters: "sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud..."

and what Swift perhaps alluded to was a sprat, (fig.)* a young, small, or insignificant person (e.g., a ragamuffin).

*in it's original sense, a sprat = a small European herring (think anchovy, smelt, grunion et al).

so what's a grotty little person (or smelt) doing in our Swiftian quote with all of that other crapola?
Monty Python strikes once again, helping us to better understand our heritage...

[a knight errant, in search of the holy grail, asks a
grotty field serf how to recognize the king]
He's the one not[E.A.] all covered in [brown]$#!+[/brown]!





#138723 02/06/05 05:24 AM
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Thanks Maverick, for the reference. Will add it to my "quick look" list.


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