Word: couplets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...music during this mercifully short third section is much slower, perhaps taking its cue from Jennens' admonition that we "Keep...still the same in look and gait/ Easy, cheerful and sedate." This final section is certainly sedate, almost verging even on morose, culminating in the final couplet of the work: a grandiose choral motto, "Thy pleasures, Moderation, give/ In them alone we truly live." Moderation is not quite so enchanting a subject as either the joie de vivre of L'Allegro or the melancholic beauty of Il Penseroso. Nor could any claim that Jennens' verse stands quite equal...
...poetry is going to match the season, why shouldn't it match the situation as well? People waiting for a Delta flight may long for some existential couplet like, "Why is it I always feel desperately lonely/When agents announce, 'This is preboarding only'?" Motorists waiting in the vehicle-inspection line who find The Raven enjoyable enough around Halloween may actually prefer a poem such as Contemplations on the Expatriate Life...
...howls and the guitars rage. Yet O'Riordan remains a terrific crafter of melodies, and a prettiness sparkles beneath the surface of her most raucous songs. The one problem is that the lyrics are sometimes a bit daft: I'm Still Remembering pays tribute to Kurt Cobain in one couplet and, in a loopy segue, lauds John F. Kennedy in the next. Perhaps O'Riordan should watch more C-SPAN...
Thirty years on, McCartney pays homage to the ur-Beatles in the lyrics he wrote for the bridge to Free as a Bird. Lennon had laid down only the first couplet: "Whatever happened to/ The life that we once knew?'' And Paul comes in with, "Can we really live without each other?/ Where did we lose the touch/ That seemed to mean so much?/ It always made me feel so ...'' "Free," sings John's disembodied voice, and the other aging lads harmonize ecstatically. The Anthology album vividly recaptures the days when John, Paul, George and Ringo were free as young...
...English tongue, the ever versatile F word. No other slang expression approaches it in its variety of permutation, application, hyphenation and intensification (e.g., unf -- -- -- ingbelievable). In its earliest recorded use (late 15th century), this word was possibly already taboo, says Lighter, who found it in a rhyming couplet written in cipher. The dictionary is rife with other synonyms for copulation; some are splendidly ingenious (for example, to have one's greens); most, however, are unprintable...