"The grill-room clock struck eleven with the respectful unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be ignored."
This week I was introduced to Saki, a writer I had entirely missed up to now. I've only just started making my way through the collection of his stories available through Project Gutenberg, so I'm not sure how his observations will sit in the long run, but I'm quite taken with his way of tucking words together. I'm not much one for ebooks - too much screen reading is no good, but for short stories it's not bad... just munch through one now and again.
While I was sitting here typing away I looked over to the couch and saw Adam and Fionn looking entirely similar - both gently asleep (in that easily woken but totally relaxed sense) with limbs flopped out. Fionn had settled on the back of the couch just above where Adam dozed. From there my mind wandered to the fact that the construction "like A, like B" is only ever used with singular categories... like mother, like daughter. This is a case of "like human, like cat" I suppose, if I stick with the proverbial sense. But what do you do with individuals? It's not a categorical statement that cats are often like their nearby humans. I'm sure someone who studied English instead of maps could fill me in.
Lacking that at the moment I go to my favorite thing about being connected with the University (aside from things like free bus passes and health insurance and all that) - free access to the online OED! If I wanted in on my own it would be a whopping $295/year (in other words, I wouldn't have it). Yay for a big research University! In this case it doesn't help me much except to learn that the construction was first documented in 1598.
Yes, this will be a place of seriously random bits of probably not very useful knowledge.
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