Word: ringed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...held back from the gallows by police and 200 soldiers. Latecomers were arriving by taxi, and villagers streamed in on foot from the surrounding countryside. Mahmud was hailed by the thunderous cry of "Salavat" (Felicity to Mohammed and his descendants). Before his hands were bound, Mahmud handed a ring to the executioner, an ancient custom intended to ensure a speedy death for a condemned man. The noose was slipped about his neck, and the hangman and his assistants hauled smartly on the rope. Mahmud shot six feet off the ground-then the rope broke, and he fell heavily to earth...
Getting dazedly to his feet, Mahmud gestured toward the hangman, grinned and shouted to the crowd: "He wants another ring!" He twisted his bound hands sufficiently to draw out a second ring from his pocket. The crowd broke into ululations of "Salavat!" Someone shouted for Mahmud to sing a song, and he obliged. A peasant stepped forward, cried: "I am from Kuchesfahan. I don't know this man and don't know why they are hanging him. Let them hang me in his stead." Others cried: "He is young-have pity!" and "Let him live...
Christians will treasure many of these sayings for their restatements of familiar themes (It is impossible for a man to mount two horses and to stretch two bows, and it is impossible for a servant to serve two masters), as well as for their beauty and ring: Jesus said: I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I guard it until the world is afire...
...sometimes seemed tinged with an indefinable futility, it was because Joyce tried to construct a universe without God. In such a universe, superstition cast a spell. He saw coincidences as magic omens and tried to have all his books published on his birthday (Feb. 2). He wore a special ring to ward off blindness. He carried a picture of the 17th century Due de Joyeux (no kin) in his wallet and told people that Joyce, i.e., joy, meant the same as Freud (joy in German...
...inmate. This method creates a bifocal picture of Southern State Penitentiary at Creighton and its chief inhabitants, the most important of whom is "the treatment man," an assistant warden and psychologist who is symbolically named Pryor. Also called the Messiah, he is a vaguely evangelical figure with a jade ring and an MG, who keeps most of the inmates under his Freudian thumb. As the story flickers between Convict Desai and Counselor Sharon, it is clear that there are flaws in Psychologist Pryor's penmanship. For one thing, what is apparently "the best state-run maximum-security penitentiary...