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Examples

  • History knows of perhaps no more startling instance of what the Greeks called peripateia, the terrible fall from prideful heights.

    Statement on Bahá’u’lláh

  • But it is my task to narrate the gradual corruption of Grimworth manners from their primitive simplicity -- a melancholy task, if it were not cheered by the prospect of the fine peripateia or downfall by which the progress of the corruption was ultimately checked.

    Brother Jacob George Eliot 1849

  • This is peripateia, the abrupt reversal of fortune.

    The Globe and Mail - Home RSS feed Michael Posner 2011

  • (losing his stake in a professional card game, his daughter becoming a young woman, Ifthikar revealing his disdain for their painfully superficial relationship), it is simple to extend the logic to the peripateia of America's antiquated stake as the supreme superpower.

    Obscene Jester 2009

Comments

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  • "'How would you render peripateia?'

    "'Why surely a reverse. But no doubt you mean it in the dramatical sense: can you not say peripety in English? The French certainly have péripétie; though to be sure they use it loosely, in the sense of ordinary vicissitudes.'

    "'I believe I have seen peripety. But it is scarcely current English...'"

    --Patrick O'Brian, The Letter of Marque, 178–179

    February 29, 2008