20
I'm pretty sure it's a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States. Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of 1984 the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere "airstrip" for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States ...
15
It's from the Hebrew phrase "Kefitzat Haderech", which literally means "contracting the path".
This is even more likely considering "Kwisatz Haderach" means "Shortening of the Way" in Chakosba, a language in Dune.
14
Commentators like William Giraldi, The Annotated Poe, point out that this refers to Jeremiah 8:22:
Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?
Wikipedia says that the Balm of Gilead, speaking figuratively, is a "universal cure," and Les Harding writes:
To ask the question ...
10
Not only does it cast doubt on Rodolpho's masculinity, the context in which this quote comes from suggests a lot more of Eddie and his attitude towards Rodolpho. While I quite agree with the word choices Matt highlighted, and his description of those words, some of the implications given are a little restrictive.
looked so sweet there, like an angel – ...
10
TL:DR - The language has been carefully chosen to cast doubt on Rodolfo's adulthood and masculinity
Eddie is a traditional, older, blue collar dock worker with a conservative attitude to masculinity and the role of men in the family. Rodolfo, his wife's cousin, is the opposite. He is young, liberal and harbours wild dreams of a singing career.
Eddie has ...
10
The word stay here means stop or pause. From Merriam-Webster:
intransitive verb
1: to stop going forward : pause
2: to stop doing something : cease
Or from the Macmillan dictionary:
4 [transitive] formal to stop something such as a court case from continuing
The defence has filed a petition to stay proceedings.
The sense is:
If ...
8
I have used this in the past: Open Source Shakespeare: Concordance
of Shakespeare's complete works. For example, you can type “beauty” into the box and get this page that shows the occurrences in each work. Here's Hamlet to The Tempest, showing that there are 5 occurrences in Hamlet and 2 occurrences in The Tempest:
(In this case there seems to be a bug—...
8
This is the original sense of the word airline. Now obsolete, it survived in works on surveying and military history into the 1960s. The OED says:
airline, n. 1. a. Chiefly U.S. A direct line through the air; a straight line between two points on the earth's surface.
with citations dating back to the early 19th century:
1829 J. F. Cooper Wept of ...
8
The full sentence of these two lines is:
A curse is on her if she stay to look down to Camelot
The translation of this verse to modern prose would be:
She will be cursed if she keeps looking at Camelot and not on her weaving
Therefore she focuses on her weaving intently, but gets captivated by the reflections of the outside world in her mirror. And ...
7
To say anything definitive about The Waste Land is challenging; indeed, this work seems to evade interpretation with each new line and stanza. With many interpretations carry with them some merit, I contend that the line "heap of broken images" is meant to evoke something broader about modernist art: this line is a metatextual reference to the poem itself ...
7
Holofernes is a character in the biblical Book of Judith (which is considered canonical in Catholic and Orthodox tradition, but not in Protestant). He was a Assyrian general under king Nebuchadnezzar, who invaded nations and destroyed their temples in order that they should instead worship the king. When laying siege to a Hebrew town, the widow Judith ...
7
A Roadside Stand describes a small-time farmer trying to sell their produce from a stall by a busy road. The farmer is poor, wanting only a small slice of city wealth, and feels bitter that drivers won't even look at the stand, let alone stop and buy something.
In this context the "trusting sorrow" is a neat encapsulation to express what is described over ...
6
Most of these aren't saying "whore". The one that does is "Hohore", which according to this page is actually "ho whore"; "ho" here is the exclamation. Also, note the r in "hore".
The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest attestation for "hoe" (for any spelling without r) meaning "whore" is from the 1964 book Deep down in Jungle:
Main who', best girlfriend....
6
So from the context, here's my understanding:
A common trend that's observed from a lot of A Happy Death is the treatment of women as mere objects, rather than as human beings. This is portrayed quite well in the beginning of that paragraph:
The natural stupidity which glowed in her eyes emphasized her remote, impassive expression.
The remark, "hello, ...
4
From this source: (emphasis mine)
Adopting a prophetic tone of archaic allusion for much of the poem,
Eliot asks, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of
this stony rubbish? Son of man,/You cannot say, or guess, for you know
only/A heap of broken images…” (ll. 19-22). Being a devout albeit
unconventional Catholic, Eliot uses ...
4
This is my first attempt at writing an answer, so I hope I have done it right in terms of links of attribution and format. If I have not, I hope someone will tell me, so I can benefit from clarification. Beyond that, I’ll simply give it a whirl!
Perhaps this is too simplistic and pedestrian of an interpretation, but maybe we can make a case for simplicity. ...
4
The kettle is (metaphorically) the thing that's been tied to the dog's tail, probably by a mischievous child, and is now dragging behind its rear heels.
Why is it battered? If it's been tied to the dog's tail all day, of course it's battered.
4
Nalo Hopkinson's story "Shift" reuses characters from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, a play that has frequently been discussed with a specific focus on colonialism/post-colonialism, race and identity. The story reuses several words, phrases and elements from the play. For example:
Hopkinson's Ariel calls Caliban his "mooncalf brother"; in The Tempest (Act ...
3
One possible term is mot juste, which means (in English),
the exactly right word or phrasing. See Merrian-Webster.
I believe it also means the same thing in French. We generally use the French phrase in English because there's no good equivalent English word.
3
For myself, as an English speaker with only a smattering of Russian from a foreign exchange trip, I did a lot of checking the glossary in the back at first (obviously, I got an edition which included said glossary), but eventually started just trying to figure it out from context, which worked well enough.
As regards Burgess's motivation, it was a ...
3
The Oxford English Dictionary says:
heave of the sea: the force exerted by the swell of the sea in quickening, retarding, or altering a vessel’s course.
So the ship was heaved by the sea and this caused the woman to fall, perhaps when she was walking along the gangplank to or from the jetty.
What have the moon and the sun to do with it? These celestial ...
3
The word "villain" is derived from the 14th-century word "villein" which means:
a free common villager or village peasant of any of the feudal classes lower in rank than the thane.
Merriam Webster dictionary
So originally, it would certainly have carried the connotation of low birth. I found this question on English Language & Usage about the ...
2
I'm no expert on this poem, but having read its first chapter (the first four stanzas, "The Burial of the Dead") several times, poring over individual words and sentences, I came up with a couple of possible interpretations of the "heap of broken images" based on context from elsewhere.
Tarot cards
The third stanza is all about one "Madame Sosostris, ...
2
Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of liberty,
What does very mean here? The Oxford English Dictionary says:
very, adj. A.I.2. With limitation (usually expressed by the or a possessive) to particular instances: The true or real; that is truly or properly entitled to the name. Now arch.
So if the “great tableland of moors and commons” is the ...
2
It means that Jenkins has embarked on a social reform agenda to build “cottage estates”, i.e., public housing: a tract of cottages for the poor.
The dialogue suggests that the speakers don’t think he is doing this out of sincerity, but because he hopes to get a Peerage out of it. A Peerage can be awarded for extraordinary achievement in some field. The ...
1
Wharton is correct if you locate the “first acts” and the “dramatic climax” in the same places as she does.
The question interprets “first acts of the tragedy” as “first in the text”, that is, those at the beginning of chapter I, in the ‘present’ of the novel. But Wharton means “first in historical sequence”, that is, the earliest actions in the flashback, ...
1
In Japanese to show affection to a loved one they usually use 好き pronounced suki which means to like something like ‘I like sushi’ or to show romantic affection like ‘I like you (romantic sense)’ or even to say ‘I like you (as a person)’.
In general suki is used rather than 愛してる pronounced aishiteru which means to love. It is a stronger form of affection ...
1
Metaphor, mainly
I wasn’t able to find any exposition of the meaning of this particular passage. However, I think the meaning is fairly straightforward. Here “white” doesn’t refer to the color of “long-clothes” or anything concrete previously mentioned in the poem.
Rather, I believe “white” here is being used as a metaphor for purity. It’s not precisely ...
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