I’m a big fan of P.G. Wodehouse, his novels have a very different way of humoring the readers and the narrative style is almost awesome. But his vocabulary and especially the conversational part of his books are quite uneasy to comprehend. It could be because he used many colloquial phrases of UK and his way of writing was very much English in its whole sense.
His opening lines are have strange adjectives and they always pose problems for me. I was reading Thank You, Jeeves and the very first line of the book is:
I was shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned.
Now, the meaning of "perturbed", the one suitable here, is “Thrown into a state of agitated confusion”, okay so far but what does “shade perturbed” mean? "Shade" means relative darkness or some allusion to ghosts. And same matter is with “spot concerned”. Are these phrases common in the UK?