Shakespeare himself described it well in a knotty passage in Macbeth, written in 1606: "violent sorrow seems / A modern ecstasy.
With this giant financial sticking-plaster on the banks, chancellor Alistair Darling will now have to turn his attention to the next knotty problem in his in-tray: how to pull the economy out of its nose-dive.
The women in corset tops and the men bare-chested, they tangled in knotty, portentous, sexualized pairings, legs lashing and torsos buckling, looking like children playing at adult games they only dimly grasped.
The question of humanitarian intervention is one of the knottiest in foreign policy, and it will arise again.
Rob Atchley, president of New Mexico Timber and Viga in Albuquerque, said that pine has gotten knottier in recent years.
Kleinfeld Bridal, the New York gown purveyor, lets Knotties in its market know about sample sales by sending out e-mails 9 to 12 months before their nuptials.
Mr. Welles charged $30,000 to finish the knotty pine in a single room in Greenwich, Conn.
The issue turns on how much and what kind of contact with Al Qaeda is sufficient to make someone on the fringes detainable — and, in some cases, targetable — a knotty problem in a war against a loose-knit, far-flung terrorist network.
The den is panelled in knotty cypress ("big in the fifties"), with pink chintz upholstery ("It used to be tartan").
The array of cashmere sweaters in SoHo, it turns out, is a knotty lesson in late-twentieth-century capitalism waiting to be unravelled.
