Fwd: one-handed quote search

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 01:18:11 -0400, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:

>><<... que j'avais plus de trente ans
>>avant que j'eusse jeté les yeux sur aucun de ces dangereux livres qu'une
>>belle dame de par le monde trouve incommodes, en ce qu'on ne peut les
>>lire que d'une main.>>
>
>Translation of that last part (from Google Print):
>
><<... that I was more than thirty years old before I so much as glanced
>at one of those dangerous books which one lovely woman of the world finds
>inconvenient, so she says, because they can only be read with one hand.>>

Hmmm, so it was originally a *woman* making the "one hand" joke? That
certainly puts a spin on the expected readership of those dangerous books.

Some critical commentary on the passage in these articles:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_studies/v032/32.3herbold.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_life/v020/20.3schindler.html


--Ben Zimmer