![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading...
Dec. 13th, 2013 11:51 pmI would not be surprised to learn that there are many little-known words lurking in the text of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, but earlier this evening, while reading McBain's Bread, my attention was drawn to a sentence in which a police officer refers to a couple of very shady characters who are almost certainly criminals involved in arson and several murders:
A look in my dead-wood Shorter Oxford—selected because it was at hand—provided the definition
Time to turn to Google, which sort of automagically brings me to Wikipedia, which despite its officially bad rap as not the kind of place you want to refer to for The Serious Stuff™ still manages to come up with the goods most of the time. (Or maybe it simply provides enough additional material that I find easy to evaluate, who knows?)
At any rate, examples of meiosis include referring to "the Troubles" when speaking about the decades of violence in Northern Ireland, or "the Pond" when speaking of the Atlantic Ocean. These sort of snapped the Oxford definition into focus, but didn't do much to illuminate the line from the McBain book.
My initial impression, upon reading the words placed in Ollie's mouth, was that the name of one character (Worthy) was ironic—certainly, based on the story line, he was most "un-worthy," but I do not see how meiosis fits in with either name, in either context (that of "a few things" or "friends"). Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?
No matter. This detail aside, I enjoyed the book.
Ollie had apparently done some thorough digging since the time he'd left Worthy and Chase with a promise to look into their company operations and the time he'd phoned Hawes to say, "I found out a few things about our friends Worthy and Chase," a choice bit of meiosis, if ever there'd been one.I had no idea what "meiosis" meant, and it did not appear to be the kind of word whose meaning is cracked using context, at least not here.
A look in my dead-wood Shorter Oxford—selected because it was at hand—provided the definition
A figure of speech by which something is intentionally presented as smaller, less important, etc., than it really is. Now rare.No kidding on that last part.
Time to turn to Google, which sort of automagically brings me to Wikipedia, which despite its officially bad rap as not the kind of place you want to refer to for The Serious Stuff™ still manages to come up with the goods most of the time. (Or maybe it simply provides enough additional material that I find easy to evaluate, who knows?)
At any rate, examples of meiosis include referring to "the Troubles" when speaking about the decades of violence in Northern Ireland, or "the Pond" when speaking of the Atlantic Ocean. These sort of snapped the Oxford definition into focus, but didn't do much to illuminate the line from the McBain book.
My initial impression, upon reading the words placed in Ollie's mouth, was that the name of one character (Worthy) was ironic—certainly, based on the story line, he was most "un-worthy," but I do not see how meiosis fits in with either name, in either context (that of "a few things" or "friends"). Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?
No matter. This detail aside, I enjoyed the book.
