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Literary notes about many (AI summary)

In literature, "many" serves as a flexible tool to evoke a sense of abundance and immeasurability across diverse contexts. Authors use it to create vivid images of both the physical world and abstract ideas, as seen in descriptions of nature and sound—“many colossal noises” intone the presence of overwhelming forces on a battlefield [1]—as well as to express complex human experiences, for example, when expressing enduring loss or the recurring nature of events [2, 3]. Moreover, the word frequently appears in idiomatic or emphatic constructions, such as “many a man dies too soon” [4], which imbue the narrative with a poetic or rhetorical force, inviting readers to consider the vast, often indefinable, quantities at play in both time and human affairs.
  1. In the distance there were many colossal noises, but in all this part of the field there was a sudden stillness.
    — from The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War by Stephen Crane
  2. For they had called me mad, and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.
    — from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  3. For many are called, but few are chosen.
    — from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete
  4. Many a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station.
    — from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

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