Word: britannicas
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...like a Log. There is no single best position for falling asleep, though the Encyclopaedia Britannica says all humankind adopts an approximately horizontal position. This is in contrast with birds, which sleep standing on one leg, with beak tucked under wing. Most people sleep on their sides, spending more time on one than the other, and tend to bend the hips and draw up the knees a little, the better to relax. Sleeping supine is likely to cause snoring, which may wake the sleeper himself, besides disturbing others...
Deep in the Forest Sauvage some 1,400 years ago, Merlyn the Magician shared a cluttered cottage with two hedgehogs, six grass snakes, a stuffed phoenix, a buzzing beehive, six pismires, the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th edition) and countless wonders for the eyes of Wart, the boy who was to become King Arthur...
...Stratford acquaintance for ?30-is on record. Such facts of his life as can be ascertained from Stratford town records and a handful of references to him by folk in Elizabethan London can easily be (and, in fact, are) completely set down in a few columns of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But for decades scholars have felt compelled to spin these few threads into an overblown fabric of speculation which the academic world charitably describes as literary biography. The latest offender is a brilliant and bumptious Cornishman named A. L. Rowse...
...Quoted below is a section from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which will correct the misconception of Artemis of Ephesus you printed in a caption [Dec. 13]. "The usual figure of the Ephesian Artemis, which was said in the first instance to have fallen from heaven, is in the form of a female with many breasts, the symbol of productivity or a token of her function as the all-nourishing mother." Ostrich eggs indeed...
...Xanadu did Kubla Khan"-At his best, Updike is able to slip unobtrusively out of light verse into something more barbed. The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells him that, except for the elephant and the giraffe, man holds his heart higher above the ground than any other animal...