[Ads-l] Long-haul trucker's lexicon + a surprise

MULLINS, WILLIAM D (Bill) CIV USARMY RDECOM AMRDEC (US) william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL
Fri Jun 2 14:45:36 UTC 2017


> When I was in college, a professor pointed out to us (discretely, the Eisenhower administration being a recent memory) an unconscious (or
> maybe
> not?) obscenity in a novel by George Eliot.  Eliot asserted of a female character that "she had only the blackest and curliest hair in her
> drawers"
> -- meaning that she wore a black, curly wig which she kept in her dresser.
> I don't now remember which novel this appears in, but at the time, showing a precocious talent for being a reference librarian, using the
> print sources in the college library, I was able to find it.
> 
> GAT
> 

And with Google Book Search, it is the work of a moment to locate the quote.
_The Mill on the Floss_ (1860)
" So of her curled fronts: Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular."

https://books.google.com/books?id=PTZWFf4RvSoC&pg=PA49&dq=%22in+her+drawers%22#v=onepage&q=%22in%20her%20drawers%22&f=false


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