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Woodslim Posted 10 years ago
Vocabulary
a question on Virginia Woolf's essay
I'm reading Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill"(http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks15/1500221h.html#ch3), and there are these lines.
"Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions; C. L. for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives' tales of pinafores and escapades"
Question: I wonder if this underlined phrase("all the simple old wives' tales of pinafores and escapades") is just that(=nothing more than it literally means), or if it is referring to some stories or myths at that time(This essay is written in 1925). I googled but found nothing.
Any guess?
Thx.
"Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions; C. L. for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives' tales of pinafores and escapades"
Question: I wonder if this underlined phrase("all the simple old wives' tales of pinafores and escapades") is just that(=nothing more than it literally means), or if it is referring to some stories or myths at that time(This essay is written in 1925). I googled but found nothing.
Any guess?
Thx.
Top answer
This seems to be a question of sentence rhythm, like in poetry. "
- This seems to be a question of sentence rhythm, like in poetry.
- "
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1 Answers
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This seems to be a question of sentence rhythm, like in poetry. It just goes well with the other words in the sentence:
"...the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street,
and all the simple old wives' tales of pinafores and escapades."
"...the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street,
and all the simple old wives' tales of pinafores and escapades."
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