Dying Of What?
One last (and humorous) dialogue from Evelyn Waugh...
"The doctors in Rome gave him less than a year. There is someone coming from London, I think tomorrow, who will tell us more."
"What is it?"
"His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word."
posted by John Musselman at 11:15 AM
2 Comments:
Please could someone explain the Waugh phrase “His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word”. I do not understand the meaning? I would be really grateful.
She means it ironically, because obviously you can't die from a word. She's saying that you can't understand what it is because it's a complicated medical term. All she understands is that it's a long word. With her tone she's saying how tragic it is that a human life can be taken away by something that you can't even understand because only doctors can understand it. It's like nature is mocking her own tragedy if she can't even understand it. And it's supposed to make you think of how Sebastian "broke a bone so tiny it hasn't a name", another instance in which Waugh deliberately doesn't give the name of a medical condition, which is obviously a huge and intentional contrast.
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