Word: bodkin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Other changes are inconsistent. In the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, fardels is replaced, but the word bodkin remains. Why? "I expect all the ladies to know what a bodkin is," says Rowse in the general introduction to his edition. ("A long pin, or skewer," according to Rowse; "a short pointed weapon" like a dagger, according to the appropriate definition in the Oxford English Dictionary...
...savagery is not a one-way street. Updike's Rabbit is roasted by Ian Duncan: "Big Chicken Henderson scoops and whittles at the space beneath his chin with a checkout-counter razor." After caricatures of versifiers like Shakespeare ("To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin") and novelists like Jane Austen ("Are you not happy in Hertfordshire, Mr. Raskolnikov?"), Editor William Zaranka confesses, "The avowed purpose of both volumes is the same: to fool the sophomores." School's out, and the books are now free to entertain and bamboozle everyone else...