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Mon 2 Jan, 2006 06:22 am
But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have a good time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.
stripping: What does this mean?
one end of him: Does this necessarily mean to cut off one's head, or to kill? Maybe it means to cut off one's leg, which is also one "end"?
Temple Bar: Does this mean a city, a town or something else? And what is it famous for? Only jails?
Then for the next two hundred years the family tree shows
a succession of soldiers--noble, high-spirited fellows,
who always went into battle singing, right behind the army,
and always went out a-whooping, right ahead of it.
a-whooping: Why does the author say "a-whooping"? Why doesn't he simply say "whooping", or "wet out whooping"
This is a scathing rebuke to old dead Froissart's poor witticism
that our family tree never had but one limb to it, and that that
one stuck out at right angles, and bore fruit winter and summer.
at right angles: Why is angles plural? I think one limb is singular.
1. Stripping: without context it's hard to be sure but the author may mean the verb in some sense like "stripping berries off a bush" -i.e. robbing or pillaging.
2 and 3. "Temple Bar" was one of the ancient gates of the City of London. For centuries it was customary for the heads of traitors to be cut off after their execution, boiled to preserve them, and be stuck on long spikes above Temple Bar, to discourage other citizens from committing such crimes. Therefore, his head was the end that was cut off.
4. You are quite right that " went out whooping" would be perfectly correct. "A-whooping" uses an archaic construction, meaning roughly "in the act of [whooping]". It used to be common; you will encounter it often in older English texts, but it is hardly ever used in modern English except in some fossilised expressions, e.g. "agape" [in the act of gaping].
5. "At right angles" is an idiom meaning "at an angle of 90 degrees". It derives from a construction that goes right back a thousand years to early Saxon English, which can be seen in a few other phrases such as "he works nights", meaning "he works at night".
Ah, yeah, the context is in the topic "a burlesque biography" by Mark Twain. Thank you very much.
I knew where these excerpts come from, because you have posted queries about the Burlesque Biography here before.
When I said that "without context it's difficult to be sure" I meant that if you had included whatever comes immediately before "But he got to going too far with it..." we would know what it was he was going too far with, and what the "parties" were that he was stripping. As it is, I don't know what the protagonist was actually doing, and so I could only guess what "stripping" means in this sentence.
Augustus Twain seems to have made something of a stir about the year 1160. He was as full of fun as he could be, and used to take his old saber and sharpen it up, and get in a convenient place on a dark night, and stick it through people as they went by, to see them jump. He was a born humorist. But he got to going too far with it; and the first time he was found stripping one of these parties, the authorities removed one end of him, and put it up on a nice high place on Temple Bar, where it could contemplate the people and have a good time. He never liked any situation so much or stuck to it so long.
Okay! It's clear from this that the "parties" are the individuals he used to poke with his sabre, and "stripping" in this context means "removing anything valuable".
Oh, thank you. Your explanation is very clear.
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