Mark Twain passage of boat, was a measure on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for "two", as in "The veil of the temple was rent in twain." The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]", that is, "The water is deep and it is safe to pass." Twain said that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In "Life on the Mississippi", he wrote: Captain Isaiah Sellers was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot
Old English metre in alphabetical order of the most frequently used type-lines in the Old English corpus. Another metrical system was put forward by John C. Pope in which rhythmic stress is assigned using musical patterns. This system seems to make more sense when considering that the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons was set to music. An explanation of the Pope system is also included in Cassidy & Ringler and in "Eight Old English Poems". The theory of Old English metre has become an obsession for many scholars, such as Sievers, but what does it all mean in the overall study of Old English