36
votes
Accepted
Why does Ray Bradbury use "flounder" for an action with a positive outcome?
While "flounder" is a negative term, it denotes a process, not an end result. If you flounder ashore after a shipwreck, that you have escaped drowning does not make your motion ...
- 4,754
34
votes
Use of "pounds" instead of "roubles" in passage of "The Idiot"
According to Wikipedia, Eva Martin's translation was published in 1915. At this period, it is likely that few British readers would have a reason to know the value (in Sterling) of the Russian Rouble ...
- 1,809
31
votes
Why do the Pern novels use regular words as profanity?
There are two issues here.
Using real world profanity may make books fall afoul of censors. This was even more of an issue back in the 60s and 70s when the first books were published, especially ...
- 4,754
28
votes
Accepted
Why do the Pern novels use regular words as profanity?
Minced oaths, from well-known ones like "gosh" and "darn" and "heck" and "fricking", to more obscure ones, are common in the real world, but even more so in ...
- 64.3k
25
votes
Why is a "cucumber sandwich" specifically used as what English faith has "only just enough teeth to get through"?
Even though cucumber sandwiches were at one point associated with poshness, as Rand al'Thor writes, I don't think this is the association on which the passage is based. Nothing in the passage ...
- 39.2k
24
votes
Accepted
Where did the term Kwisatz Haderach in Dune originate?
Kefitzat Haderech is a Jewish phrase that means "contracting the path".
Herbert defines Kwisatz Haderach as "the Shortening of the Way" (Dune: Appendix IV), clearly meaning to reference the Hebrew ...
- 1,273
18
votes
Accepted
Why are there three different versions of the "solid/sullied/sallied flesh" line in Hamlet?
Since Hamlet was published in several editions during the Jacobethan era, it is worth looking at how these early editions rendered these lines, using the old-spelling editions published by Internet ...
- 39.2k
14
votes
Accepted
Why does the Lady of Shalott stay instead of stray?
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:
...
- 15.3k
14
votes
Accepted
What does Lady Macbeth mean by "what thou art promised"?
The other answers have explained the meaning of the line—that Macbeth shall be king, as he was promised by the witches—but there is more to say about the choice of wording.
The difficulty here arises ...
- 40.9k
14
votes
Why does Ray Bradbury use "flounder" for an action with a positive outcome?
This is an interesting observation. Checking definitions of the word "flounder" reveals that they are, as the OP claims, mostly very negative.
The key to the usage in this sentence is, I ...
- 14.9k
14
votes
Accepted
In Macbeth, why is Fleance 'scaped?
The murderer’s choice of words here is an attempt to deflect or minimize his responsibility for the failure to kill Fleance. He knows that he and his fellows failed Macbeth (“We have lost best half of ...
- 40.9k
14
votes
What can be gleaned from Lovecraft's usage of the words "obscene" and "blasphemous"?
The central theme of Lovecraftian horror is that the rest of the universe beyond our flat little neighborhood is so alien as to be practically incomprehensible to us, often in ways that are harmful to ...
- 590
12
votes
Accepted
"Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs."
Stanley Wells's edition of the play (The New Penguin Shakespeare, 1972) has the following gloss for "bogs":
bawdy; it is not certain whether bog meant "privy" in Shakespeare's ...
- 39.2k
12
votes
Accepted
Why is a "cucumber sandwich" specifically used as what English faith has "only just enough teeth to get through"?
Cucumber sandwiches, specifically, are a stereotypical part of English "posh" culture, along with afternoon tea and "More tea, vicar?"
From Wikipedia:
Cucumber sandwiches formed ...
- 64.3k
11
votes
Accepted
Why does Shelby Foote use the phrase "airline miles" in The Civil War: a Narrative?
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 ...
- 40.9k
11
votes
Accepted
Harry Potter German translation - use of word "Eingeweide"
The first example in Der Orden des Phönix seems to be
Solch wilde Gedanken wirbelten durch Harrys Kopf, und seine Eingeweide verknoteten sich vor Zorn
The original English is
These ...
- 630
10
votes
Accepted
Language in A View from the Bridge
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 ...
- 386
10
votes
Language in A View from the Bridge
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 ...
- 14.9k
10
votes
Accepted
Origin and significance of E-I-E-I-O in the Old MacDonald song
As with any folk song, the origins of the lyrics can be a bit murky, but given transcriptions collected by folklorists in the early part of the twentieth century of this or related songs, we see that ...
- 2,468
10
votes
Accepted
Why is snow compared to "ash" in the poem "Snowfall"?
Ash particles are not the opposite colour from snow. Ash is generally pale grey to white in colour. The products of burning that are black are the heavier bits, the cinders, and the soot that deposits ...
- 15.8k
9
votes
Why did Emerson choose 'hobgoblin' in his quote 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'?
Sense 2 of "Hobgoblin" in my OED is
fig. An object which inspires superstitious dread or apprehension; a bogy, bugbear.
It gives citations dating from 1709 to 1841-2, the latter being the ...
- 3,880
8
votes
Accepted
What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
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 ...
- 1,325
8
votes
Comparing frequency of word use across Shakespeare's plays
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 ...
- 1,294
8
votes
Accepted
Does Joyce, in Finnegans Wake or Ulysses, link the sound form "hoe" to "whore"?
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 ...
- 1,629
8
votes
Which does this part refer to, a pencil or the words?
The pencil. Holmes is saying that the "broad-pointed, violet-tinted" nature of the pencil is not an unusual pattern for pencils, so Holmes can't identify anything sufficiently unique about ...
- 6,654
8
votes
Why is Helen's speech here in the Iliad described as being given "warmly"?
The original Greek text is VI.332
τὸν δ᾽ Ἑλένη μύθοισι προσηύδα μειλιχίοισι:
where μειλιχίοισι means “gentle, soothing” (the word is related to μέλι meaning “honey”). This adjective does not seem ...
- 40.9k
8
votes
Accepted
Why is Philoktetes specifically hunting "doves"?
TL;DR: Doves could have been a common bird that Philoktetes hunted and ate, given his situation in the play, making them the species that came most readily to mind in the quoted speeches.
Philoktetes ...
- 40.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible