What a mercy that would be.
"What a mercy that was not a pike!" we say, too, when some unpleasantness could have been much worse.
Now we must do what we can to free them from the "cold mercy" that comes with criminalizing mental illness.
Indeed, a noose around her neck, the duchess is graphically yanked this way and that before uttering a single word, "mercy," that signals too little too late.
On the one hand it can mean a chemical angel of mercy that may save life, relieve pain or merely give a man a better erection.
Patients in badly supervised programs have been caught selling pills or sharing with desperate relatives -- acts of greed or mercy that could lead to doomsday strains of the virus.
It's a mercy that impact statements don't need updating, even if some of us would love for rapists to receive weekly reports for the rest of their lives on the damage they've caused.
There was Amit's fellowship in Texas, which he couldn't turn down; and there was the difficulty of finding time to plan a wedding, not to mention the expense; there was their youth, of course, and the uncertainty that comes with it, the fearful cloudiness of the future (and what a mercy that was, to be considered, at nearly thirty, still hopelessly young).
Last week, he said he was letting all rank-and-file priests grant absolution to women who have had abortions — an initiative for the upcoming Year of Mercy that has had significant impact in a country where the abortion debate is a pressing political issue.
Beatrice is suggesting that only a bastard would be apt for her and also hinting at her yearning for the understanding and the mercy that would render her loss of virginity irrelevant to a prospective husband, and at the unjust inequality of judgment that pardons a man's sexual dalliance but not a woman's.
A portrait from the early 60's of a poor old white man with the black daughter of a servant is a good example, a gorgeous and oddly tender image: the two subjects (the girl had casually wandered into the picture frame while Mr. Goldblatt was photographing the man) seem momentarily bound together by a mercy that transcends the nature of their relationship.
