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Examples
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She would prove to him that wippen was a grand sporta game of honor and skill.
Pendragon: Before the War: Book One of the Travelers D. J. MacHale 2009
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She would prove to him that wippen was a grand sporta game of honor and skill.
Pendragon: Before the War: Book One of the Travelers D. J. MacHale 2009
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Demissus est per sportam, mended his book, and made it Demissus est per portam; because sporta was a hard word, and out of his reading: and surely their errors, though they be not so palpable and ridiculous, yet are of the same kind.
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For these critics have often presumed that that which they understand not is false set down: as the priest that, where he found it written of St. Paul Demissus est per sportam, mended his book, and made it Demissus est per portam; because sporta was a hard word, and out of his reading: and surely their errors, though they be not so palpable and ridiculous, yet are of the same kind.
The Advancement of Learning Francis Bacon 1593
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_sprote_ was a puzzle to me, and I had often questioned myself as to its meaning, but never could get a satisfactory answer; nor was it until some time after the publication of the 2nd edition of my _Analecta_ that it occurred to me that it might signify a wicker or _sallow_ basket (such as is still in use for the capture of eels), from Lat. _sporta_, whence the German
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[margin note: sporta] in this miracle is of larger capacity than the basket [margin note: cophinus] in the former, or that by this point of difference they might remember the two separate miracles; for which reason also He then made the number of baskets equal to the number of the disciples, but now to the number of the loaves.
Catena Aurea - Gospel of Matthew 1225?-1274 1842
chained_bear commented on the word sporta
"There is considerable information about spot prices in Alexandria and other ports and enough consistency in weights and units of currency to demonstrate considerable price variations. In 1355, for example, an Alexandrian sporta of pepper (about five hundred pounds) cost 163 gold dinars, a very high price for the period. Eleven years later pepper cost less than half that amount--between 75 and 86 dinars. It declined to a quite inexpensive 60 dinars per sporta in 1386, but in 1392 (for reasons we don't know) it was already 88 dinars in April and soared to 129 by August of that same year. It hovered between 60 and 100 for the remainder of the 1390s, but reached a breathtaking 200 dinars in 1412 before beginning a long decline."
Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2008), 115.
November 28, 2017