Musings on The Wounded Name

[luzula]

Some of you may enjoy the comment where I search for how many times the speech verb "ejaculate" is used in various 18th century novels and draw conclusions, and mildred_of_midgard's preceding comment on the usage of "ejaculate" over time.

During my recording of The Wounded Name, I am really noticing how different Laurent is from various other Broster characters, in that he doesn't care about his military duty. It would have been fairly easy for him to escape from the place where he and Aymar are prisoners, but does he? No, he stays to nurse Aymar. And later when he's free, does he return to the army? Nope, he stays with Aymar with some transparent excuse for why he's not leaving. To be clear, I too would rather stay and take care of my friend than go off and fight for Louis XVIII against the Bonapartists! But I wonder why Broster does not use Laurent's duty as a way of heightening the dilemma in the book? Perhaps because if Laurent's duty were properly invoked, he would have no real excuse to stay for so long. But Aymar, who does care about military duty, doesn't seem to mind that Laurent is basically deserting (though I'm not sure if it is technically deserting when he was a volunteer to begin with).

Also, it makes for an interesting contrast with Keith Windham, for example—who is, of course, a professional. Perhaps the general to whom Laurent was aide-de-camp rolled his eyes and did not actually miss this aristocratic dilettante. I am reminded of Duffy's characterization of the stereotypical aide-de-camp as "young, pretty, well-born, and mounted on a fast horse".

Comments

[garonne]

I have a collection of plaintext files of novels from different centuries, so I had a quick look at the number of times I could find some variant of the word 'ejaculat*'

century, number of words, number of occurences of ejaculat* | %

17, 224348, 0, 0.000000

18, 720303, 5, 0.000694

19, 5719410, 76, 0.001329

20, 2016617, 18, 0.000893

21, 1621855, 1, 0.000062

They all relate to speaking, except the 21st century one, which is in a sex scene!

It's not very big sample, and also not really an unbiased sample. It's a collection of books from my own library which I then converted to plain text and cleaned up (removing table of contents etc.) so I could do this sort of analysis. Still, interesting to see how well it matches with what you were discussing in those comments!

Also, haha, I dread to think what Keith would make of Laurent if they met :P

[luzula]

This comment is very you. : D Anyway, the 19th century frequency is actually only twice as large as the 18th century one. But yeah, less common, anyway.

Hee, Keith would roll his eyes and think that Laurent is a young puppy...