Shakespeare, who saw Magna Carta not as a triumph for liberty but rather as a shameful attempt to weaken the monarchy, offered a phrase for it in his play King John: "So foul a sky shall not clear without a storm".
The British passion for conversation about property has inevitably given birth to exchanges along the lines of, 'My mortgage is bigger than yours,' and mentioning that you 'maxed' your card out at the weekend is a boast rather than a shameful admission.
It is rather due to a shameful lack of political will -- the solution is primarily political.
It culminates in a rather shameful imputation of a Satanic cast to Hillary Clinton.
A distinguished former editor wrote a rather shameful article wholeheartedly agreeing: "If MI5 warns that this is not in the public interest," ran the headline, "who am I to disbelieve them?" Obama's panel of experts profoundly disagree: "It will not do for the press to be fearful, intimidated or cowed by government officials," they write.
It is already $200 million in arrears, a rather shameful record given the commitment of private groups with fewer resources.
Battle raged through the sweaty afternoon in the Salle des Pas Perdus of the Palais de Chaillot, a triumph in its way for the brutal and indefatigable spontaneity of Mr. Khrushchev's methods, and a rather shameful day in the history of international affairs.
So it was considered rather shameful, rather hard up, of a girl to agree.
Unsurprisingly, these notions are knocked off course by Sarah's parents, but not through any power on their part to forbid Sarah's involvement with Jack; rather, they reveal to Jack a shameful secret which has been hinted at throughout the narrative, and which will be known to readers of The Secret River, but to which Sarah is somehow oblivious.
When we looked at dance music fan-fiction earlier in the year we dealt with the realm of sexual fantasy that's usually curtailed when wet dreams become a shameful memory rather than a clear and present danger, and it was, well, funny.
