Topical Guide 362
Mark Dorset
Language: Idioms: “Down in the Dumps”
“Ella,” said Lorna, “have you spoken to Dudley recently?” There was concern in her voice.
“No,” said Ella. “I haven’t. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lorna. She stepped into the room and walked to the window. She stood there a moment, looking across at Dudley’s living room window. She sighed. “He seems awfully down in the dumps to me. I wondered what you thought.”Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 15
MY FRENCH TEACHER, Angus MacPherson, must have noticed the downcast look that I wore throughout his class—a particularly knotty one on the uses of the subjunctive—because he stopped me on my way out the door and said, with a look of concern, “Peter, you seem a bit—how do you put it—down in the dump.”
“Dumps,” I said.
“Yes, that’s it, the dumps, ‘down in the dumps.’ But why should it be so? Here in Babbington there is but one dump, unless they are hiding another from me. Are they? Is there a dump known only to initiates in a secret society of refuse and rubbish?”
“Um, no,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Then one must be down in the dump, not the dumps, and that is where you seem to be. Why is that, Peter?”
“I’ve been rejected,” I said.
“Ah! An affair of the heart! Of such sweet pain the teenage years are full to overflowing, I am afraid. Doubtless you will experience rejection many times. ‘Learn young, learn fair; learn auld, learn mair.’ In my own case—”Flying, “Taking Off”
Love: Varieties of
When she had finished the dishes, Lorna went into the living room and sat at the piano with the lights off. Herb was off playing cards with the Spotters Club, and Ella was in Dudley’s arms, where she was rediscovering, to her surprise, a set of sensations that she thought she’d never experience again and learning, for the first time, that love is not a homogenized, unvarying blend. In the dark, Lorna began to play “Lake Serenity Serenade.”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 15
In the manner of a chowder, which is a complex and subtle mixture of elemental foodstuffs, the emotion that we call love is a bewildering and varied concoction of more elemental emotions: lust, friendship, curiosity, guilt, and fear, among others. Tastes in chowders vary from person to person, from nation to nation, from region to region; one’s own taste in chowder changes over the course of one’s lifetime, and it may even shift from day to day. So it is with tastes in love. Some like theirs chock full of voluptuous scarlet tomatoes; others prefer something rarer, more exotic, heady with saffron; and still others like theirs bland and sturdy, with cream and potatoes.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
All these young men are … under the feet of Fortune, yet more than equal to Fate. Always ready to mount and ride an if, witty as a feuilleton, blithe as only those can be that are deep in debt and drink deep to match, and finally—for here I come to my point—hot lovers, and what lovers! … Eclectic of all things in love, they will serve up a passion to a woman’s order; their hearts are like a bill of fare in a restaurant. … They have by heart their chapters—Love-Taste, Love Passion, Love-Caprice, Love-Crystallised, and more than all, Love-Transient.
Honoré de Balzac, A Prince of Bohemia (translated by Ellen Marriage)
See also: Language TG 11; Language: Dialect, Slang, Idiolect, Shibboleths, Jargon TG 137; Language: Slang, Insults, Terms of Abuse TG 140; Love, the Things we Do for: TG 77; TG 90; Love: Its Nature TG 158; Love: Varieties of TG 158
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