As you step out in the cold misery of a British May, you don your hat. Then you see a lady of your acquaintance and you doff your hat. Then you don it again. Doff. Don. Doff. Don. And suddenly you realise, in a moment of etymological ecstasy, that the verb don is merely a contraction of do on, and that doff is merely a contraction of do off. And you're so excited that you kiss that poor lady and run off howling and hatless.

Роман Джейми О'Нила, как хорошее вино, я долго выдерживала на полке. Этот густой язык сложен для восприятия: дублинский слэнг, внутренний монолог героев, склонность автора скорее к аллюзиям на реалии, чем прямому описанию.

But it’s odd the way these things go: it’s not the reader you need to convince, but yourself. When I was sure I was comfortable with some aspect – street furniture for instance – I was happy to write nothing about it. After all, who walks along a street noticing the postbox? The danger of too much period detail is that your characters drown in it: the universality of emotions is lost, and your book becomes merely an historical fiction. But I needed to be sure I knew enough, in order to leave most of it out.

И все же буквально с первого же абзаца терпким послевкусием остается почти стихотворный ритм прозы:

Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys...

- чувство влюбленности в родные места, а речь героев удивительно ярко вычерчивает характеры. Думаю, если перечитать, будет только вкуснее.

Роман, конечно, исторический, уже потому что он посвящен Ирландии 1915-1916 годов, периода, полного подспудной жизнью. И все же он не исторический - в нем практически нет исторической перспективы, зато равновесно с большими событиями, очень жизненно, нас занимают, на первый взгляд, незначительные, частные происшествия, разговоры, обещания, мечты. Море. Острова. Знаки.

И в общем-то близкая мне идея того, что любовь к отчизне, и в том числе стремление отстоять ее самостояние с оружием в руках, вырастает из таких частностей, как улыбка любимого человека, или воскресное утро, проведенное за плаванием. Пожалуй, только, слишком уж явно прописанная в концовке романа.

(The whole notion is that two boys, in their friendship and their love, would discover their own country - a country, in the end, that would be worthy of their fighting for it).

И, конечно же, его нужно бы перечитать, и перечитать со словарем, что я, конечно, заленюсь сделать - читать роман нужно так же, как он писался и задумывался:

Ten years I worked at that hospital, the ten years it took to write At Swim. Like a good lover, that novel provoked me, angered me, it left me despairing at times – but it never bored me, the writing of it. I loved the research, learning new words, new facts, learning how to research even (seven years before I hit upon a newspaper library!) Much of writing, of course, is avoiding the page, and research can become the surest form of pencil-sharpening.
Then again, I have a love for words. For me, the sounds of words, their rhythm in a phrase, can advance a plot, reveal a character, as readily as the dullest meaning. I remember my delight in finding the word ‘tarse’ – the OED defines it as ‘penis’ and records its last outing in the 1700s. A fool loses his readers in arcane words, but the formulation ‘by arse or by tarse’ was too good to let pass.

... они, конечно, не прошли, но не поделиться этим сейчас же я не могу.

Cottoning on to something, in the sense of understanding it is a rather odd phrase. Indeed, it's so odd that it doesn't exist in America, so far as I can tell. On those strange shores cottoning on means getting on well with, which is in fact exactly what the phrase meant on these strange shores a hundred and fifty years ago.

In John Camden Hotten's A Dictionary of Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London (1860), you'll find this entry; and it's pretty easy to see how you can go from liking something to understanding it.

COTTON, to like, adhere to, or agree with any person; "to COTTON on to a man," to attach yourself to him, or fancy him, literally, to stick to him as cotton would. Vide Bartlett, who claims it as an Amercanism; and Halliwell, who terms it an Archaism; also Bacchus and Venus 1737.

Well, Halliwell was right. The phrase is, to all intents and porpoises, pre-American and has been around since the mid sixteenth century. So far as anybody can tell it comes from the practise of lining clothes with cotton. So something that is made of a coarse, thick, warm material on the outside can have a cotton interior to make it comfortable. A dictionary of 1706 has this:

In making Hats, To Cotton well, is when the Wool and other Materials work well and imbody together.

Obviously, the inner and outer layer have to fit perfectly together and thus cotton well, and thus two people who fit together perfectly are said to have cottoned.

Or there's the possibility that it comes from the Welsh cytuno, meaning agree. I'd try to combine the two explanations, but they just won't cotton.

Оригинал взят у el_loco в Найден ребенок!

Children are a relatively powerless minority, and, like all oppressed people, they know more about their oppressors than their oppressors know about them.

Information is currency, and information that will allow you to decode the language, motivations and behaviour of the occupying forces, on whom you are uniquely dependent for food, for warmth, for happiness, is the most valuable information of all.
Children are extremely interested in adult behaviour. They want to know about us.
Their interest in the precise mechanics of peculiarly adult behaviour is limited. All too often it seems repellent, or dull. A drunk on the pavement is something you do not need to see, and part of a world you do not wish to be part of, so you look away.
Children are very good at looking away.