In the novel Hard Times, Mr James Harthouse, a
Lucifer-figure in the languid guise of a swell, invites Tom (his quarry) up to his
rooms, to begin the course of moral seduction, and to continue the process of
depravation so well-begun by the young man’s narrowly nominalist pedagogic
antecedents. He offers him a
smoke, and then
a cooling drink adapted to the
weather, but not so weak as cool.
Which is to say:
a stiff one.
This sentence is a gem of compression, and a wonder of
indirection. Even knowing its
implicated meaning, you are not quite certain how the trick was done. And here, moreover -- and what
lifts this effect above the level of mere elegance -- the semantico-syntax
perfectly mirrors the method of the Devil when first he approaches his prey
(and before you have signed your soul away in blood): smooth, suave, but always just a bit óff in ways you can’t quite put your finger
on.
I attempted such effects myself, with increasing brazenness,
in a series of detective stories (I Don’t Do Divorce Cases and
subsequent productions), in which the client who shows up at the detective’s
door has been effectively sent by
the Devil, and who is later, ever more clearly, the Devil himself.
~
However, I am no credentialed theologian, but only an LPL (Licensed Practical Linguist), and so
must leave off such speculations and return, like some reverse Cincinnatus, to
my own field, and attend to the furrow which is mine to plow: to wit, the linguistics of the thing.
This “not so weak as cool” is an example of one type of qualitative comparison: rather than
assessing two items quantitatively along a single dimension (as, “John is
taller than Bill”), it assesses a single item in two contrasting dimensions,
as:
longer than it is wide
more sinned-against than sinning
more clever than scrupulous
more clever than scrupulous
The more usual syntax in a case like ours, is “not so much X as Y”, but the abbreviated
version may occasionally be found in writing that strives for elegance:
Van Dine, The Bishop Murder Case (1928):
"`Did you find [it] difficult?' -- `Not so difficult as tricky.'" (i.e., not so much...)
"`Did you find [it] difficult?' -- `Not so difficult as tricky.'" (i.e., not so much...)
However, our two examples differ in the details of their
semantics. In the Van Dine
quotation, it really means: “I
wouldn’t really describe it with your word difficult; the word tricky, while semantically related, better meets the case”. That is to say, we are still in a sense moving in a
single dimension of assessment (albeit one qualitatively rather than
quantitatively graded), and are groping for the mot juste. In the Dickens mot, by contrast, there are genuinely two distinct dimensions of
assessment -- the temperature vs. the alcoholic strength of the drink -- and
both designations are juste; the relative placement along these
separate scales is indicated by the comparison. The Dickensian case really does differ from the Van Dinean,
and this is reflected in its syntactic possibilities: the Van Dine example could equally well have been phrased “not
so much `difficult’ as ‘tricky’ ”, whereas the one from Dickens could not be
similarly rephrased -- “not so much ‘weak’ as ‘cool’”, which does mean
something but means something quite different.
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