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Sat 26 Apr, 2014 08:29 am
-"My dear Watson, you know how bored I have been since we locked up Colonel Carruthers. My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove? But here, unless I am mistaken, is our client."
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By googling, I find that a racing engine is part of a car's inner system, but the problem is, when the above excerpt was written, things of this kind were supposedly non-existent; do engines of this kind have anything to do with horse racing? Does it have any special connotation? Google does not help here.
@WBYeats,
No, in this case the word "racing" simply means over-revving.
The engine (the motor) is going too fast because "it is not connected to the work for which it was built."
People often say (or write) "My mind was racing" - that is, many ideas and thoughts seemed to be occurring in a short space of time.
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