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> comfortable enough to bend the rules sometimes.

Mmm. The world we actually have suggests that this comfort is dangerous.

Robert Browning was a famous poet. Certainly competent enough with English that you'd assume he knows what he's doing and can bend the rules. So, Dictionary makers were a little confused by the passage in Pippa Passes, "Then owls and bats / Cowls and twats / Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods / Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry". Why did Browning use the word "Twat" in this context? Turns out that he just had just assumed it was a word meaning a hat nuns wear...

Oops. Of course this goof just means a high school literature teacher covering Browning has to decide whether to skip this part of Pippa Passes maybe "for time" and hope nobody asks about it, or explain to the class that even the best of us screw up sometimes. In Computer Software our mistakes are often not treated so kindly.




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