Word: wretched
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...least six of the poets are former slave traders, including John Newton, the slaver turned evangelist amd abolitionist whose famous lyrics about God's "amazing grace . . . That saved a wretch like me" originated as a song of thanks for his deliverance from the sinfulness of slavetrading. Another former slave dealer, James Stanfield, composed an epic of several hundred lines entitled "The Guinea Voyage" (1789), in part of which he depicted the birth of a baby in the wretched squalor of the slave decks. (Art and life were not so distinct: the black poet Ignatius Sancho, who later became a figure...
...Melbourne Cup horse race day is an undeclared national holiday, and the Aussies bet on cards, numbers, events and animals like nobody's business. They did nothing to hide their gambling habit during the Games, which was fine with me. To the great pleasure of my ink-stained-wretch brethren and the chagrin if not horror of the International Olympic Committee, the Sydney organizing committee's welcoming press party was - get this! - an afternoon at Rosehill Racecourse. "Watch, bet and enjoy Australia's favourite sporting pastime," read the invite. "A selection of Australian food and drinks will be served...
...politician for whom such scrutiny is a comfortable experience is indeed an exotic species. The Gore campaign's comments about having nothing but the highest regard for the press ought, too, to be taken with copious amounts of salt - after all, the vice president was once an ink-stained wretch himself...
...Norse referred to the indigenous peoples they encountered in Greenland and the New World as skraeling, a derogatory term meaning wretch or scared weakling, and the sagas make it clear that the Norse considered the natives hostile. But the abundance of Norse items found at Inuit sites--some 80 objects from a single site on Skraeling Island, off the east coast of Ellesmere Island, including a small driftwood carving of a face with European features--suggests that there was a lively trade between the groups (as well as an exchange of Norse goods among the Inuit...
...later years, he discerned how democracy could be distorted, pointing to Republican France and Napoleon (a "wretch," Jefferson declared, of "maniac ambition"; he added "Having been, like him, entrusted with the happiness of my country, I feel the blessing of resembling him in no other point"). Jefferson stitched together popular sovereignty and liberty, all under divine sponsorship and legitimized by ancient precedent and English tradition. Writes the historian Merrill Peterson: "For the first time in history, 'the rights of man,' not of rulers, were laid at the foundation of a nation. The first great Colonial revolt perforce became the first...