Word: sot
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...Magnificent & the Sot. The metals and jewels for the sultans' baubles usually came from abroad. Selim's only son, Suleiman the Magnificent, was probably responsible for a good part of the collection. Under him, the empire stretched to the Adriatic Sea and gobbled up Rhodes. Suleiman's admirals could pillage the Mediterranean, and it was thought proper for a grateful admiral to shower his sultan with gifts...
Suleiman himself was a sulky Sultan. He was rightly called The Lawgiver, but he beheaded grand viziers right and left, even had his two ablest sons murdered. The one remaining son eventually became Selim the Sot, the first of a long line of drunkards and degenerates that ruled until after World War I, when the sultanate fell and the great Mustapha Kemal Ataturk took over the rule of Turkey...
...Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth. This comedy of picaresque errors and escapades, set in colonial Maryland, is as deadly serious as it is wildly funny. Its sobering thesis: since man cannot penetrate the multiple masks of reality, he can never really know himself...
...this, Ebenezer innocently signs away the family property and sees the family manor Maiden, turned into a bordello. By the time he is captured by Indians, Ebenezer finally understands "the crime I stand indicted for, the crime of innocence." He abandons poetry and finishes out his life as a sot-weed factor, or tobacco peddler...
Lost Garden. Bawdy in manner and ironic in detail, The Sot-Weed Factor i that rare literary creation-a genuinely serious comedy. Author Barth, 30, assistant professor of English at Penn State, is clearly fascinated with the multiple facets of reality and just as clearly convinced that the real is unknowable. "No man is what or whom I take him for!" cries Ebenezer wildly, and indeed the Poet Virgin cannot even penetrate the "vasty reaches" of himself. Unlike Candide, he cannot cultivate his garden, because he is too lost in philosophic speculation to understand that the garden is there...