Epilogue Most people would be hard-pressed to define mettle because it is almost always used only in that context.
Readers can probably contribute more.
Thus, the often-seen misspelling. The word wrought, often believed to be the past tense of wreak , is instead the archaic past tense of work . Later, under the Ptolemaic theory of the universe, it came to mean the vault of heaven. Lawyers can claim their share of expressions used only in one context, some so odd that even they do not know what the words mean. Sometime ago I wrote a column about that phrase after a poll of northeast lawyers and judges showed that none knew what the word meant, though they continued to use it in legal documents.