Before reaching middle age he was an already obstinative Conservative, and opposed to every innovation, whether in politics or literature.

Seal up your lips, and give no words but mum.

“Again. Tell it again!” cried Fagin, tightening his grasp on Sikes, and brandishing his other hand aloft as the foam flew from his lips.

Copulas provide an example of the haphazard evolution of quantitative finance. The key result is Sklar's theorem, which says that one can characterize any multivariate probability distribution by its copula (which specifies the correlation structure) and its marginal distributions (the conditional one dimensional distributions). Thus one can create multivariate distributions by mixing and matching copulas and marginal distributions.