Not sure if I'm posting in the right place but here goes. Have just started reading my new copy of Mary Lou and on page 105 Vi hastily recasts her sentence in German, thereby losing a good deal of the pregnancy of the situation. I only have an updated 1980's version to compare it with and it is missing completely there. Should it be poignancy?

Sorry, the pagination is different from my hardback - could you remind me of which chapter please?

The chapter is Mary-Lou turns pleader. Thank you!

Pregnancy may well have been the right word there. Pregnancy doesn't just mean "going to have a baby", which meaning EBD would never have dreamed of using ; it can mean full of meaning or suggestion, significant, implying more than is expressed, pressing, urgent, or cogent. I've quite often read the phrase "a pregnant pause....".

Yes, my h/b has "thereby losing a good deal of the pregnancy of the English sentence".

As RubyGates says, it can mean "the cogency or weight of an argument; clearness of evidence or proof; a compelling reason" (OED online). I think this is a less common usage these days, perhaps because we're OK about saying 'pregnant' in the baby context. When the book was written people were rather less frank about such things, and went in for lots of euphemisms such as 'expecting', ''in the family way' and so on.

And never forgetting "being busy" of course.

And then Madge says in Gay from China "The family's having an extension in September"...

Thank you everyone. Yes I've heard of a pregnant pause but this is a new usage for me. Well never too old to learn.......

I've also been reading the uncut edition for the first time, and find the tornado charade in chapter XIII most puzzling.

Does Devon have an unusually famous tor? And what is 'When did you last see your father?' Presumably he said "nay" to something? The only part that made any sense to me was the tonic sol-fa, though ML et al. were a just a few years early for indelible "Do(e), a deer." (Sad to say, I can't remember the ending to the learning tune that predated it in my education! Do-re-do, we all know; Mi-fa-mi, small steps now; Sol-la-sol, on the go; Do-ti-do, __ ___ ___. Anybody know this one?)

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Castor oil: Triacylglycerol from Ricinus communis containing hydroxy-fatty acids.

I sometimes think we need a CS Encyclopaedia - the more time goes by, the more some of these references need annotating, like Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice!

Devon has lots of tors, though I don't know that any are particularly famous - there is one called Bellever Tor, though

'And When Did You Last See your Father?' is a Victorian painting by William Frederick Yeames which is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walk ... ourfather/

From Chapter XIII of Mary-Lou: the various forms each have to provide an item of entertainment at short notice when a Saturday evening at St Mildred's is cancelled because of bad weather

VB finally elected to act a charade, After a good deal of discussion, they finally chose 'tornado' for their word...
"How'll we do it?" Vi asked.
"Tor-nay-do' - and you pronounce the last bit 'doh', don't forget," their leader told her. We can have something about Devon for the first part - Oh, I know! We'll have a tourist office and people coming to ask about places to go to. Someone can ask what there is to see in Devon."

('Nay' was covered by 'something historical', which was the painting mentioned, and 'do' by 'doh' from the tonic sol-fa system - 'doh-re-mi')

No wonder Joan Baker moaned that the evening entertainment wasn't much fun .

I associate tors with either Derbyshire or Glastonbury .

There are a lot of references in the CS books that I wouldn't have known without looking them up even now, never mind when I was around 12 which I think was EBD's target market - I've never come across The Crown of Success anywhere else, for one, and (apologies to people who're into Scottish poetry!) it was ages before I "got" why Miss Leslie's nickname was "Bonny". I'm never sure whether it's just me, whether they're something which most girls at the time would have known but most girls of later generations wouldn't, or whether the original readers would've been confused as well!

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

http://setinthepast.wordpress.com/

Thank you! That picture certainly fits the way they're apportioning roles. I'm still not sure how to get "nay" out of it, but -- oh, well. I think we'd have done something simplistic like have a pretend horse pretend to neigh.

I'm also curious as to whether speech is normally allowed in charades there, as it certainly is in Mary-Lou if people are meant to ask about sights in Devon. For us, charades were strictly silent, complete with symbols for things like "first syllable" and "sounds like."

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Castor oil: Triacylglycerol from Ricinus communis containing hydroxy-fatty acids.

The charades we played at school certainly had words in them. In fact they were almost exactly as played at the CS. You spilt a word up into syllables, acted each syllable separately, trying to hide the bit you were saying as best you could and then acted the whole word. If you were very cunning you ran two words alongside each other to confuse the opposing teams....

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Cestina's dolls houses - Curtain Up!

Given the existence of permitted speech, the 'nay' would have to come somewhere in the dialogue between the questioner and the boy: "I have not seen him this twelvemonth" "Nay, I cannot believe that", for example. Yes, it does seem a bit convoluted, but the aim appears to be to mislead the audience as much as possible, as with the game of Subject and Object in Ruey.

It's so long since I played charades that my memory of the rules is hazy, but my recollection, like yours, is that it was done without speech.

I think there are two legitimate versions of charades. The wordless one became very popular after the TV show whose name escapes me, took the UK by storm about 30 years ago - ah yes, Give us a Clue.

With words was the norm when I was a child although we occasionally played "mimes" which was wordless, though without all the elaborate clue-giving of today's version.

I imagine "house rules" would have varied enormously.....

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Cestina's dolls houses - Curtain Up!

"Charades" was only ever known as "Give Us A Clue" in my now sadly very distant youth . That was the only version I knew. My auntie was obsessed with it and always made us play it at any sort of family gathering in the '80s .

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

http://setinthepast.wordpress.com/

And was it a solo turn with people leaping up whenever they thought of something they could do?

Or did you act out elaborate scenes as we used to when we played Charades-with-Words? Occasionally complete with costumes...

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Cestina's dolls houses - Curtain Up!

They were two different games in my youth: charades was done with teams, scenery and acting/improvisation and Give us a Clue, known, for some reason, as The Game, was also a team game, but was done silently by one team member acting out what (I think) the opposing team had given them, and the rest of their team had to guess. With various obvious-things, like whether it was a book or a film or a song title, and how many words. Then there was Dumb Crambo, which was different again but I can't remember how it was played....

And of course there's Sound Charades, a round in Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (which usually results in an absurd double entendre about Lionel Blair).