A clever gambler wagers just enough to get ahead of the game, but not so much that he could be knocked out.

But through the oligopoly, charcoal fuel proliferated throughout London's trades and industries. By the 1200s, brewers and bakers, tilemakers, glassblowers, pottery producers, and a range of other craftsmen all became hour-to-hour consumers of charcoal.

To the accompaniment of a plain, sparsely unforgiving string arrangement, a lonely old lady dies her lonely death, her only funeralgoer the equally lonely priest who buries her.

Theodor Adorno argued that what a given poem seems to say in a literal sense is often contradicted by its formal disjointures, by what he called a poem's parataxis, and that its truth content must be seen as illusory in a special sense.