{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018518518518518517, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006613756613756613, 'mean_word_length': 5.007936507936508, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Thrice-Ploughed Woe (Sophocles, Antigone 859)1

It is easy to fault old handbooks for reducing the lyrics of Greek tragedy to ‘poetical arabesques’,2 but it remains hard to stay afloat on the extraordinary level of language which characterizes such songs. Attributive adjectives in particular can easily be ignored or translated into woolly English, and the Parryist approach to Homeric epithets provides a precedent for doing so; but however strange a word or image may sound in our ears, it must always be better to tackle it as if it originally expressed something clear and straightforward. My purpose is to try to reconstruct the pattern of thought behind a single extraordinary adjective, which to my knowledge has not been faced squarely before now.