’24 A To Z Challenge – E

I don’t mean to poke you, or put too fine a point on it but, the épée, also rendered as epee in English, is the largest and heaviest of the three weapons used in the sport of fencing.  The blade of a standard adult epee is 35 inches (.899 m, for those who wish to get stabbed in metric) – 4 inches shorter than my rapier – and that’s not a sexting joke.

All evasion and egotistic self-promotion aside, I wish to present you with a lovely word, well past its prime, and rendered technologically obsolete

EPOPEE

Epic literature, particularly poetry – from the French – ėpopėe

In the classical past, they needed a word to describe the likes of War and Peace, a 900-page Russian saga whose first 150 pages are just the cast of characters, and their blood and married relationships to each other.  It represents an epic poem titled, Casablanca, which begins, “The boy stood on the burning deck.”  Some discussion occurred among scholars, about whether it represented faith and loyalty, or was a critique of blind obedience to social norms and morės.

It epitomizes the least favorite piece of literature that I ever studied, the poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a grueling gauntlet of words, stretching over 145 stanzas, 7 chapters, and 19 pages – all to showcase the loneliness, and aloneness of long-voyage sailors.

People had the time to write these sagas, and read them, and discuss them.    All that changed when the Bluescreenitis plague ravaged the world, reducing intellect and attention spans to nil, and short-span Tik-Tok videos, and Instagram posts of a plateful of pork and beans became the norm.   😮