Questions tagged [meaning]
Questions regarding the meaning of certain terms or phrases used in a work of literature. If your question concerns the symbolic significance of something whose surface meaning is clear, use the [symbolism] tag instead. Please add specific tags as well: for the author (if known), the language (if not English), and either the work itself (if long) or the [poetry] or [short-stories] tags for short works.
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Meaning/translation of title "The Light Fantastic" by Terry Pratchett
I have read The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett in English and always interpreted the title as "The Fantastic (adjective) light (noun)". Mostly because I do not see "Fantastic" ...
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What does Mark Twain mean by "cheers and a tiger"?
I know about the big stripey cat, but what is "a tiger" in this context:
...finishing up with cheers and a tiger for "Hadleyburg purity and our eighteen immortal representatives of it.&...
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Meaning of a 19 century joke printed in a newspaper, with punchline "Oh, mother, what a good job the cat’s a black one"
From a 19th century newspaper:
A family who had the misfortune to lose their father were discussing what mourning would be required, when the youngest, a child of six, said :
"Oh, mother, what a ...
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What is a Daniel?
In Chapter Three of The Scarlet Letter we find the following as a response to a question of who the father of Hester’s child is:
Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who ...
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Meaning of "the field was found to be plowed as thoroughly as any young man at Oxford" in 'The Book of Dragons'
E. Nesbit, in The Book of Dragons, toward the end of the chapter titled 'The Island of the Nine Whirlpools', wrote:
The nine rubies were used afterwards in agriculture. You had only to
throw them out ...
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Explain the 28 Feb 2022 Dilbert cartoon use of the phrase "sticking the landing"
Can someone explain today's Dilbert cartoon, in particular explain what "sticking the landing" means?
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Meaning of 'Yawl write, hear?'
I am currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. In chapter 6 there is a sentence by Dill. Before leaving, he says
'Yawl write, hear?
What does this sentence mean? Does it mean that they ...
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What does it mean to laugh like the letter k?
In Abuelito Who by Sandra Cisneros, the symbolic meaning of one line is quite confusing. The narrator is referring to her grandfather (abuelo), and she says he:
who used to laugh like the letter k
I'...
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The meaning of "The rest is silence" in "Hamlet"
Hamlet's very last words are
The rest is silence.
What do they actually mean? This being Shakespeare, I reckon the significance of these words cannot be only the banal comparison between death and ...
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Meaning of "The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed" in "Ozymandias"
From "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold ...
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What do these espionage tradecraft phrases from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy mean?
When Ricky Tarr is recounting his story to George Smiley, he speculates that Boris -- a Russian spy working undercover as a trade delegate -- was "waiting for a connect, working a letterbox, maybe, or ...
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What are the "old euphemisms" in The Great Gatsby?
In chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby, Nick describes Daisy's reaction to the people of West Egg:
But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled ...
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What does 'Gilead' mean in The Raven?
Poe's poem The Raven contains the following words in the fifteenth stanza:
[...] tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!"
What does 'Gilead' mean ...
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Meaning of "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!"
From Finnegans Wake, What is the meaning of this word? In context:
The fall
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once ...
kmiklas
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What does "halter" mean here?
The following sentence occurs in Mark Twain's sketch Private History of a Campaign that Failed:
The drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the reflection that ...
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1
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What does "if the court knows herself" mean?
In In the Midst of Alarms (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates was camping with his unkind friend in Canada, when the police issued a warrant against Yates.
“Stilly,” cried the reporter cheerily, “there’s a ...
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Is Deeper Magic something more than God (the Emperor beyond the Sea) in Narnia?
When Aslan is asked why he has to die in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he answers something in the sense that there is a "deeper magic" that he has to obey.
What exactly is this &...
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Explanation of the line 'But you don't really care for music, do you' in "Hallelujah"
In the first verse of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", there are these lines:
Now, I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music,...
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What does this quote from The Great Gatsby mean?
Here's the quote:
My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.
That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,
whose head made damp the pajama ...
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2
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Meaning of Pratchett's quote about coffee from "Thud!"
Terry Pratchett wrote in Thud!:
Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self.
I am struggling to understand the meaning of it. Is it pro/contra ...
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What does "Maybe it's a Big Horse I'm Morporkian" mean?
In Terry Pratchett's book Raising Steam, there is an explanation of the phrase "Have seen the big horse" where the author uses the sentence "Maybe it's a Big Horse I'm Morporkian". ...
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4
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What did Melville mean by the "Pythagorean Maxim" in "Moby Dick"?
From Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the ...
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1
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What is "the line children draw to represent a bird in flight"?
The expression on her face, then, had been the one he'd seen,
hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin, her upper lip like
the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.
I'm ...
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1
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"My father declared he should invent a slip button"
From Lady Saba Holland's memoir of her father the Rev. Sydney Smith, published circa 1855:
The reigning bore at this time in Edinburgh was ——; his favourite subject, the North Pole. It mattered not ...
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Meaning of "none so poor to do him reverence" in Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar"
I am wondering about the meaning of the word "poor" in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2:
Antony But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world; now lies he ...
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1
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How does soap undermine the church in "A Connecticut Yankee"?
In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in the chapter "Morgan Le Fay", the main character explains that he makes the knights have signs for "Persimmon's Soap" ...
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Meaning of "furnished with a pipe and a supply of cold without" in Trollope's "Orley Farm"
In Trollope's Orley Farm we are told that Mr. Moulder was "furnished with a pipe and a supply of cold without." What does this mean? It appears a little later that Moulder also has a glass ...
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Why did the stars throw down their spears?
William Blake's poem “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience contains one couplet whose meaning has always puzzled me, lines 17–18, the first two lines of the fifth stanza:
When the stars threw ...
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What does it mean to greet a guest with an unsheathed sword?
In A Game of Thrones, Chapter 24, when Tyrion Lannister visits Winterfell on the way back from the Wall:
“Any man of the Night’s Watch is welcome here at Winterfell for as
long as he wishes to ...
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What does "The Edge of Doom" mean?
The following stanza is from Robert Frost's Into My Own:
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask ...
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What is meant by "without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob Marley" in A Christmas Carol?
Near the end of Stave 3 of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge a Christmas party hosted by Scrooge's nephew Fred. Fred's wife plays a song that was familiar with Scrooge's ...
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In Kerouac's On The Road, what is snakejuice?
Fairly straightforward question. There are a lot of slang terms for drugs in On the Road, but I was still rather startled by "snakejuice"
"Man, do you imagine what it would be like if ...
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In To Kill a Mockingbird, what does "let the dead bury the dead" mean?
In the ending chapter of "To Kill a Mockingbird", Atticus and Mr Heck Tate (the Sheriff) are deciding who is responsible for the death of Mr Ewell. Atticus thinks Jem killed Mr Ewell but Heck knows it ...
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Meaning/significance of "All the King's horses" in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme?
If you're not familiar with the nursery rhyme: after Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall, you get the two lines
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again
But what ...
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Meaning of "d-n" in "'T is strange—the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,' the English always used to govern d—n"
From Byron's Don Juan:
She liked the English and the Hebrew tongue,
And said there was analogy between 'em;
She proved it somehow out of sacred song,
But I must leave the proofs ...
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What is a bootless oath?
In Book X (10) of The Illiad Hector (edition: Britannica Great Books of the Western World (The Illiad and The Odessey together), rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler) swears the following oath
...
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What did Dante mean by "Papè Satan, papè Satan aleppe" in the Inferno?
So, I was recently re-reading the Inferno, and I have come across this quote which I can't make sense of.
"Papè Satan, papè Satan aleppe," (VII.1)
It seemed rather weird that it wouldn't ...
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What does the last sentence in chapter 2 of Crime and Punishment really mean?
The sentence I'm referring to is this one.
‘And what if I am wrong,’ he cried suddenly after a
moment’s thought. ‘What if man is not really a scoundrel,
man in general, I mean, the whole race ...
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What does "kettle at the heel" mean in this Yeats poem, "The Tower"?
What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
...
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Meaning of a Trollope quotation about the "best dressed gentleman"
In the self-help manual Pushing to the Front (1911) by Orison Swett Marden, at the start of Chapter XV ("What a good appearance will do"), I find this quotation:
I hold that gentleman to be the ...
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What does "skimmish" mean, in this eye dialect?
This is perhaps a surprising instalment in my sequence of Watership Down questions, being about human dialect and nothing to do with rabbits at all. Of course, it comes from the chapter "Dea ex ...
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What does "men of straw" refer to in this passage from an Arsène Lupin story?
The story in question is "Le coffre-fort de madame Imbert" or in English "Madame Imbert's Safe". The passage reads, in the translation I've got:
For six months, I have worked on ...
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Why does "it always turn out to be the King of Sweden"
In Reginald at the Theatre, Saki writes:
[Reginald]: “There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one’s own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded ...
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What is "the poem" that the spider refers to in Philip Dick's short story "Expendable"?
In the short story "Expendable" by Philip K. Dick, the protagonist is a man who can communicate with spiders. At one point, after fighting off a home invasion by an army of ants, the ...
user5387
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2
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Origin of the war-cry "Eulalia" in Brian Jacques's Redwall series?
In Brian Jacques's Redwall series, "Eulalia" is the traditional war cry of the badgers and hares of Salamandastron. It's also the title of one of the books in the series, but it's used ...
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What does it mean for a person to be "up" themselves?
I've just come across the short story "Do You Love Me?" by Peter Carey via a story-ID over at SFF. The basic premise of the story is that when something isn't loved, it disappears.
Upon reading ...
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Krazy language in Krazy Kat, 25 July 1936
The eponymous hero (or heroine) of George Herriman's Krazy Kat cartoons uses a very peculiar language. Most of the time, it's simply phonetical and is easy to understand, but in the strip that ...
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What are the "dark Satanic mills" in Blake's Jerusalem?
The short poem Jerusalem by William Blake - not to be confused with his much longer epic poem of the same title; I'm talking about the "did those feet in ancient times" one - contains the following ...
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What is the "a-" prefix in "a-flying" and "a-getting" in Herrick's "To the Virgins"?
From Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time":
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To morrow will ...
user12179
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1
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What is the libellous meaning of ‘daffy-down-dilly’?
In Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel Unnatural Death, the barrister Mr Towkington advises Lord Peter Wimsey to be careful to avoid libel:
‘You are too easily surprised,’ said Mr Towkington. ‘Many words have ...
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