Slate's Troy Patterson has written a fun piece on the long-outlawed practice of dueling and what alternatives a man might resort to today. Such as an Inuit song duel, for example.
It's full of interesting historical tidbits on dueling, which was outlawed in the sixteenth century but endured for three more centuries. Even the flannel-waistcoat-wearing Colonel Brandon of Sense and Sensibility did it. (His line "we met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct" was code for facing each other at dawn, swords drawn). Which, I susprect, is the real reason Marianne Dashwood agreed to marry him.
