I've always like the different times, and the references to TV programmes and so on. I only read three of the school setting books (Autumn Term, End of Term, and The Cricket Term) as a child as that was all my library had, so I think I just accepted it then. Reading the rest of the books of an adult, the changing settings intrigued. Mary Gentle does something similar in some of her books (Rats and Gargoyles, The Architecture of Desire, Scholars and Soldiers, Left to His Own Devices), with the same characters in different settings. The Architecture of Desire has a parallel Restoration; in Left to His Own Devices, there are computers. I think it was part of the charm of the books to see what the characters took on for each setting. The slang just struck me as a group idiolect, peculiar to this group of friends and family and their setting, adopting some from the wider world, and some, like 'trimmensely', as a blend word, like 'ginormous', that was just part of their vocabulary. Their world, boarding school, hunting, riding, estate owning, was alien to me, and the language use was part of that.
The slang in The Thuggery Affair makes it one of the hardest books to read, but I think that's because a lot of it was made up by AF for that book, rather than trying to use current slang. But there's scenes in that book that definitely make me glad I've read it. I think it's worth the slog!
I'm curious about Peter's dreadful nickname of Binks.
I wondered if it was one of those nicknames that people use to refer to a baby before the baby born, and then the name sticks. Friends of friends used to call the pregnancy bump/baby 'Binkle', and I doubt very much if they'd read AF, so I assumed it's just the kind of name that gets used in that situation. Said friends had a lot of difficulty calling the baby by his proper name when he arrived, so I wondered if it were a similar situation with Peter. I'm not sure how much that fits with the characters of Commander and Mrs Marlow though!
The Oxford Dictionary of First Names (eds Hanks and Hodges, 1990) tells me that Bunty is a nickname, occasionally a given name, popular in the early 20th century, of uncertain derivation, but most likely from a dialectal pet name for a lamb (they don't say which dialect) from the word 'bunt', meaning to butt gently. It doesn't strike me as being any worse than Buffy as a name. :-) The Guinness Book of Names (Dunkling, 1995) doesn't include Bunty in the first name statistics lists, which means it was used as given name for less than 1 in 10,000 births from 1900 to 1990.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-06-28 08:12 am (UTC)The slang in The Thuggery Affair makes it one of the hardest books to read, but I think that's because a lot of it was made up by AF for that book, rather than trying to use current slang. But there's scenes in that book that definitely make me glad I've read it. I think it's worth the slog!
I'm curious about Peter's dreadful nickname of Binks.
I wondered if it was one of those nicknames that people use to refer to a baby before the baby born, and then the name sticks. Friends of friends used to call the pregnancy bump/baby 'Binkle', and I doubt very much if they'd read AF, so I assumed it's just the kind of name that gets used in that situation. Said friends had a lot of difficulty calling the baby by his proper name when he arrived, so I wondered if it were a similar situation with Peter. I'm not sure how much that fits with the characters of Commander and Mrs Marlow though!
The Oxford Dictionary of First Names (eds Hanks and Hodges, 1990) tells me that Bunty is a nickname, occasionally a given name, popular in the early 20th century, of uncertain derivation, but most likely from a dialectal pet name for a lamb (they don't say which dialect) from the word 'bunt', meaning to butt gently. It doesn't strike me as being any worse than Buffy as a name. :-) The Guinness Book of Names (Dunkling, 1995) doesn't include Bunty in the first name statistics lists, which means it was used as given name for less than 1 in 10,000 births from 1900 to 1990.