Word: rapscallion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...origin lost in the misty beginnings of all folklore, rapscallion Reynard's tale has been told and retold in a score of tongues. His name, his cunning, and the basis of some of his adventures are discernible in Aesop's fables and in the Hindu myths from which those fables came. In the 19th Century, philologist and fairytale-teller Jacob Grimm republished the story with all the gusty lustiness of earlier tellings; in a politer version Goethe made an epic poem of it. No less than 27 episodes of Le Roman de Renard were penned in medieval France...
...variations on this theme, Dr. Hanson implied connections between dissonance and passion, sex, revolutionary ardor and crime. Thus when Wagner, in the Lohengrin Prelude, wished to evoke virginal purity, he used far fewer dissonances than in the Tannhduser Bacchanale. Palestrina's contemporary, Don Carlo Gesualdo, a 16th-Century rapscallion who ended by hacking his wife to pieces with a knife, used far more dissonances than pious Palestrina...
DEATH TURNS THE TABLES-John Dickson Carr-Harper ($2). A capital battle of wits between gruff old Dr. Fell and a nimble adversary over who killed the rapscallion fiancé of an English jurist's daughter. Doesn't quite come off, but good reading for those who like the puzzle type of story...