With Julie out of town I read more and am making some good progress on my pilgrimage with the innocents, abroad.
In a very circuitous way, I was reminded to look at a short story of his, where I found this line:
No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.
Hee, hee. All over the place, you find hee, hee in his writing.
So I was surprised to find him use a "lightning bug" word in The Innocents Abroad. If I weren't teaching the SAT course, I would bother posting about it, but I might bring it in to class.
About eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago, Saul, a native of Tarsus, was particularly bitter against he new sect called Christians, and he left Jerusalem and started across the country on a furious crusade against them.
See, it's the word "crusade." Unless you're a Christian of some ilk or stripe or wood or whatever you can't really be on a crusade, can you?
Oh, well. It's still a great read.
2 comments:
I know of many crusades and most of them not Christian in nature.
I know what you mean, and yet the literalist in me says, "Well, then they're not crusades." Like it or not, agree or not, the words are related through the symbol of the cross.
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