Word: fragment
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...literature, and Petronius was mocking Roman bluenoses when he pretended to deny it. But the great gaiety of the work, and the sharpness with which Petronius satirizes esthetes, pedants, bad poets, the nouveau riche and the rapacious poor, lift this gutter odyssey well above the merely pornographic. The fragment that remains of the original huge manuscript is a mixture of prose, poetry and puns, fustian rhetoric and sweaty argot...
...little or no influence in society." Wielding the satiric pinpoint that is sometimes more deadly than the sword, Twain proceeds to let the hot air out of do-gooders, religious humbugs and assorted hokum peddlers. To vary the pace, there are tall tales, a ghost story, an acted-out fragment from Huckleberry Finn. The humorist even prophesies his own death with the return of Halley's comet (1910): "The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together; they must go out together...
...oldest piece of literature in Houghton is a fragment of Egyptian hieroglyphic material which experts date somewhere between 1500 and 2000 B.C. Houghton does not own much really ancient material, but its collection of medieval work, much of it in the form of medieval manuscripts, is particularly strong...
...sizable advantage in weaponry enables one side to push its case much more firmly. A weaker opponent cannot rationally afford to meet his opponents' raise, especially if each side knows the other's hand. If the Soviets can marshal a substantial missile margin they can force peripheral issues and fragment our alliances by bullying smaller nations into neutrality. In short, our missile supply may be sufficient to discourage Russian attack once the brink of war is reached; but when the Soviets possess missile superiority they may be able to force our allies to yield before the critical point is reached...
...elaborate Greek insult to editorial pencil wielders. Rhypokondylos, used in a fragment of Plato Comicus (sth century B.C.) and meaning "with dirty knuckles," can also, by a slight linguistic stretch, be taken to mean "with dirty pencils," since a later Greek word for pencil is kondylion...