Word: ju
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Korea in 1392, as in 1965, was a nation violently divided. The Koryo dynasty was challenged by the House of Yi, and civil war was in the air. At this dangerous juncture Jong Mong-ju, a minister loyal to the old dynasty, paid a courtesy call on King Taejo, the father of Yi Bang-won, the leading strategist of the opposition. His host's son, in salutation, took up a harp and sang this sinister and seditious ditty...
...cold fury, Jong Mong-ju extemporized this celebrated reply...
...never did. On the way home, Jong Mong-ju was ambushed and assassinated...
Poetry in medieval Korea was an aristocratic art that was practiced principally in an aristocratic form: sijo. The word means "time rhythm," and it describes a flexible tercet that has the form of a syllogism and the force of a heroic haiku. Yi Bang-won and Jong Mong-ju addressed each other in sijo, and over the next five centuries their example was emulated by thousands of eminent statesmen, generals and courtesans. A vast literature of sijo resulted, and even these stiff translations by Inez Kong Pai suggest that it is a poetic form whose recognition by the West...
Sixty-Minute Split. For divorce-bound New Yorkers, Mexico offered advantages. A Mexican divorce takes one day and roughly $500 (v. $3,000 in Reno), including jet fare to El Paso and cab fare across the border to Juárez. The only real requirement is the mutual consent of the parties to the divorce. Thus in 1954, a Rumanian millionaire named Felix E. Kaufmann spent about one hour in Juárez registering as a "resident" and petitioning the local court to grant him a divorce based on incompatibility with his wife Susan. Susan's lawyer duly appeared...