Playing with recent assertions that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, Duffy asserts on the strength of a single famous but elusive phrase in one Shakespeare sonnet about "bare ruin'd quiers" that "In the mind and mouth of the most illustrious of all Elizabethans, the Tudor religious revolutions had elicited not even the most equivocal of endorsements".
"'Sex equality' is an elusive phrase," the book begins, speaking of the world beyond jurisprudence.
To start with the last and most elusive phrase: when Thomas Jefferson wrote "the pursuit of happiness," he certainly had in mind the acquisition and preservation of property, and 237 years later this has come to be identified, probably by a larger number of people, with "consumption" and "personal pleasures".
The German texts, taken from Kafka's diaries and letters, are truly fragments: elusive phrases with powerful imagery shorn of any larger context.
They, too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations: the pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip-of-the-tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac's cul-de-sac.
But "the unshaven prickle/ of a sharpened razor" which the "pang" evokes is itself elusive: the phrase produces a tingle, rather than a specific image.
The dreamy slower middle theme is daringly elusive, with irregular phrase lengths and chromatically restless harmony.
The precise origins of the phrase are elusive, but its surge in popularity — one can buy T-shirts emblazoned with it — derives from its inclusion in one of the more successful picture books of recent years, "Pinkalicious," by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann (HarperCollins; $15.99).
The precise origins of the phrase are elusive, but its surge in popularity one can buy T-shirts emblazoned with it derives from its inclusion in one of the more successful picture books of recent years, "Pinkalicious," by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann (HarperCollins; $15.99).
"With this cross-out," Berge theorized, "we can surely recognize the everlasting unease of the great psychologist who, in his subtle turns of phrase, strived to reflect the most elusive nuances of thought no matter what".
The next day, the government says, he left a voice mail for an indebted, suddenly elusive gambler, saying classic phrases like, "I know where you live," and "It's out of my hands" and "Someone will knock on your door, I guess, or whatever".
