elaby: (Lestrade - CJ <3 guh.)
[personal profile] elaby
In terms of realizations these may not rank high on the life-altering list, BUT STILL.

1. Do you remember that time I posted asking the LJ hivemind about some ancient practice where people would, for revenge, dig up the dead loved one of someone they were angry at and prop the body at the offending party's door? It was, and still is, for extended metaphor purposes in a Philip Marlowe ficlet that I've come quite close to finishing. We weren't able to come up with anything, but several people thought Mesopotamia sounded reasonable.

[livejournal.com profile] caitirin, kind indulgent wife that she is, told me to put in whatever movie I wanted this evening, so naturally I put in Titus (fabulously trippy Julie Taymor adaptation of "Titus Andronicus"). AND AND AND.

Act V Scene I
AARON:
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot

*FACE. PALM.* How did I not remember that?! It's TA for god's sake! I spent the most painful semester of my life underneath an avalanche of patriarchical Titus Andronicus scholarship! Nevertheless, I feel ridiculously satisfied to have finally figured out where I heard this.

2. Somewhere we were talking about Lestrade - it was in The Slasher's Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I think - and we came upon Lestrade's comment in SIXN that "You wouldn't think there was anyone living at this time of day who had such a hatred of Napoleon the First that he would break any image of him that he could see." I noted in my annotation that "at this time of day" sounded odd to me, and that since the only other usages of it I found were in the 1850s and '60s, maybe it was archaic. However, I was poking around Wikipedia learning about English dialects today, and on the page about the Norfolk dialect, I found this in the "phrases" section: at that time of day (in those days, e.g. beer only cost tuppence a pint at that time of day)

Perhaps Lestrade's family is from Norfolk?
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