Quibble (plot device)
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A quibble is a common plot device, used to fulfil the exact verbal conditions of an agreement in order to avoid the intended meaning. Its most common uses are in legal bargains, and in fantasy, magically enforced ones. Clever and unusual quibbles startle and please readers, but clumsily contrived ones can seem artificial ways to escape a fictional problem.
In one of the best known examples, William Shakespeare used a quibble in A Merchant of Venice. Portia saves Antonio in a court of law by pointing out that the agreement called for a pound of flesh, but no blood, and therefore Shylock can collect only if he sheds no blood.
[edit] Common plots
Quibbles are frequently used to thwart wishes. In one of Aesop's fables, Zeus agreed to give the bee a wish; when she asked that her sting be fatal, he agreed, and added that it would be fatal to her.
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.
[edit] Heroes and villains
Villains use quibbles to escape the fair consequences of their agreement. Loki having bet his head with Brokk and lost, he forbids Brokk to take any 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 29th and will not have his twenty-first birthday until he is eighty-eight, and so compel him to rejoin them. In Patricia C. Wrede's Talking to Dragons, after Daystar has rashly promised to help a princess, Shiara tries to quibble the way out of the request: the princess asks for his sword, but the sword Daystar carries is the Sword of the Sleeping King and therefore not Daystar's at all. Daystar rejects this, as he had actually made the promise.
Heroes and innocent characters may use quibbles to escape injustice or prevent wrong-doing. When the hero of the ballad The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward is forced to trade places with an imposter and swear never to reveal the truth to anyone, he tells his story to a horse while he knows that the heroine is eavesdropping. Similiarly, in the fairy tale The Goose Girl, the princess pours out her story to an iron stove. In Piers Anthony's fantasy world, Xanth, the law requires that the king to be a Magician and forbides 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 to take the throne 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.
[edit] Prophecies and spells
Loopholes in prophecies are also sometimes called quibbles: In The Lord of the Rings, despite Glorfindel's prophecy that "not by the hand of man will [the Witch-king of Angmar] fall," the Witch-king is slain by Éowyn, a woman. When Croesus was told by the Pythia that going to war with Cyrus the Great would destroy a great empire, the empire was not Cyrus's but Croesus's. In Macbeth, Macduff was able to kill Macbeth, who was unable to be harmed by anyone of woman born, because he was "From his Mother's womb untimely ripp'd" It may also be used for loopholes in spells: in Ruddigore, the baronets are cursed to die if they do not commit a horrible crime every day, but failing to commit such a crime is committing suicide, a horrible crime (a realization that brings one of them back to life), and in Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, a book that inflicts terrible fates on any man opening it causes mild annoyance to the Librarian, who was transformed into an orangutan. In both situations, if a character discovers the quibble, the cleverness has the same effect as when he finds it in a bargain, and even when the character does not, the reader can appreciate the cleverness of the situation.
