Examples
A pact with the devil commonly contains clauses that allow the devil to quibble over what he grants, and equally commonly, the maker of the pact finds a quibble to escape the bargain.
In Norse mythology, Loki, having bet his head with Brokk and lost, forbids Brokk to take any part of his neck, saying he had not bet it; Brokk is able only to sew his lips shut.
In The Pirates of Penzance, Frederick's terms of indenture bind him to the pirates until his twenty-first birthday; the pirates point out that he was born on February 29 and will not have his twenty-first birthday until he is eighty-four, and so compel him to rejoin them.
When the hero of the Child ballad The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward is forced to trade places with an impostor and swear never to reveal the truth to anyone, he tells his story to a horse while he knows that the heroine is eavesdropping. In the similar fairy tale The Goose Girl, the princess pours out her story to an iron stove, but not knowing that the king is listening.
In Piers Anthony's fantasy world, Xanth, the law requires that the king be a magician and forbids ruling queens, but when in Night Mare one king after another falls to an invasion's hostile magic and it appears that no more magicians exist to take the throne, the last magician king observes that while the law forbids ruling queens, it nowhere restricts the title of "king" to men, and several sorceresses take the throne to fight the invasion.
Quibbles are the theme of the Twilight Zone episode The Man in the Bottle. A genie freed from a bottle grants a couple four wishes, warning that every wish has consequences. One of the man's wishes is to be in a position of great power, the leader of a modern and powerful country who cannot be voted out of office. The genie turns him into Adolf Hitler during his final days in World War II.
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode The Circle, Captain Sisko is ordered to evacuate the titular station against his better judgment. However he notices that his superiors did not specify the extent of the evacuation, so he orders a complete evacuation of all their equipment, which will take far longer and necessitate some officers staying on the station in the face of an impending siege, giving them a chance to fight back. Likewise, The Way of the Warrior, Sisko is forbidden to tell the Cardassians about an imminent invasion of their empire by the Klingons. However, if the Klingons take Cardassia the Federation and Bajor will be put at risk, so he calls in the station's resident Cardassian tailor/spy to measure him for a suit while he discusses the imminent invasion with his senior officers.
Read more about this topic: Quibble (plot Device)
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)