Word: sonnet
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...first Protestants, were followers of a French merchant named Peter Waldo. They publicly objected to papal pomp and corruption, and in the 13th Century were driven into the hills, where they managed to survive despite sporadic attempts to exterminate them. One massacre inspired Milton to write his famed sonnet...
...whip lash in the face is considered bad manners, at least. When it happened twice last week to a jockey in Siena, Italy, he quit and let his whip-wielding rival win. Instead of being barred for life for such tactics, the winner was wined & dined, and a sonnet composed in his honor was distributed throughout the town...
Like so many monks, the boys of Eton and Harrow had practiced for weeks, preparing fair copies of Wordsworth's sonnet, Upon Westminster Bridge. The Etonians leaned heavily to 16th Century chancery-a tight, slanting, angular style brought by Vatican scribes to Elizabethan England, which avoids loops, keeps "t's" and "p's" short, uses a broad pen for contrasting thick and thin strokes...
...plummets through a thousand-year time span at a pace which leaves Shakespeare and Milton two lectures apiece. Examinations stress spot passages and details about the authors. When a man is through with English 1, he knows that "Proud-pied April dressed in all his trim" is from Sonnet XCVIII, and two semesters' worth of similar facts. This mass of detail may be an essential basis for English concentrators who are required to take the course. But it does not help non-concentrators who are looking for a background in English literature, for a course which does not exist...
...Manly Smile. Each chapter is constructed as rigidly as a classical sonnet around a single major "hazard" to the hero or heroine, and invariably ends just as death's jaws close. Serial writers ran out of hazards years ago, have been working switches on them ever since; the loose cotter pin on the stagecoach, for example, has been used an estimated 7,000 times...