Deplorable Word word itself, and had vowed that none of them, nor their descendants, would seek to discover it. Jadis said she had "learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it". The book does not say what that price was, or give further details on the Deplorable Word. Lewis does not explicitly link the Deplorable Word to any specific weapon of mass destruction, but he alludes to the power of humanity to destroy life. Writing in 1955 in the midst of the Cold War, Lewis has the lion Aslan say to the central characters from the
The Man and the Lion that honesty outweighs boasting. In other versions, the lion asks who made the statue and refuses to take it as evidence on learning that it was a man. In the late Latin version of Ademar of Chabannes the lion takes the man to an amphitheatre to demonstrate what happens in reality, while William Caxton has the lion pounce on the man to make its point. But Jefferys Taylor argues facetiously, at the end of his "Aesop in Rhyme" (1828), that it is the fact that lions cannot sculpt which is the true proof of their inferiority. During the Middle Ages