@Lola,
Quote:What's Darwin's opinion on the subject?
It was an off-the-cuff remark. Something a little improvisational and not a little self-indulgent. Blurted unthinkingly in the vain hope that it might stimulate the conversation around here which you cannot but admit is a trifle trite.
From the very beginning of my cyber-life, which you probably have only a vague memory of, when I was constrained in my methods of rubbishing a certain party's ideas by my gentlemanly attitude that one simply does not make a man look silly in the presence of his squeeze, I have approached A2K as if it was a pub. Or, during closing hours, as a building site brew-cabin but one on a large development by an equal opportunities type of outfit.
I think it an error of judgement to come on A2K with witnesses present at the keyboard end. I am gentle with Setanta, for example, because of my regard for Beth just as I would be if they were in a pub with me. The major flaw with a site like this is that the ladies can't be shooed into the sitting room when the cigars and brandy are introduced. Conversations where the opposite sex is present are not the same as those where they are not.
One or two people here did read some of my early posts but it didn't take them long to put me on Ignore.
Too many people on A2K address the congregation as if they were explaining copulation using a banana and a milk bottle; such items having been chosen during the lesson preparation as being more appropriately fitting than a stick of chalk and joining the end of the forefinger with the tip if the thumb, the obvious first thing to come to mind, or a clenched fist and a loosely rolled-up map of the world.
Having now been caused to think about what came off the tip of my tongue, I think Mr Darwin might have laughed. He must at some point have had a magnifying glass on a dung-beetle rolling a ball of dried **** up an incline as a metaphor for what the young men of the Hampshire minor gentry were faced with.
But I don't think that too many of Miss Austen's many admiring readers who consider themselves part of a literary elite due to them viewing their appreciation of her works as a mark of their cultural taste would consider her universal from that point of view. They are more likely to be experiencing a vicarious semblance of what being a member of the minor gentry was like but without any bodice ripping.
