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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I ran into this today but can’t find it again. However, Googling such famous bights as the Bight of Benin produces many unselfconscious examples:
“The Portuguese found Muslim merchants entrenched along the African coast as far as the Blight of Benin. The slave coast, as the Blight of Benin was known, was reached by the Portuguese at the start of the 1470’s.”
“Bight” in the sense of “coastal indentation” or “bay” is of course a fossil usage, probably known to very few. “Blight” is a natural substitution, especially if the writer thought of the Benin coast as “blighted” by the slave trade.
Of course, there are plenty of deliberate puns as well—the “Great Australian Blight” defined as “littering,” for example.
Klakritz has already noted “bite” for “bight.”
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