Since September I’ve gotten 38% of the way through Moby Dick according to my e-reader and posted thoughts here.
Something unexpected I get from it is – before I read this, the only place I ever saw the insult ‘blockhead’ was in Peanuts. Where it’s used a lot. I wonder if Charles Schulz got the idea from here?
@severedhand Is it maybe a weird translation thing? What was the Russian word?
I remember someone commenting somewhere else a long time ago on something similar. They observed that Dostoevsky novels always say someone “flew at” someone else.
I don’t know whether that was a translation thing. It was a popular idiom at one time, I guess, but I don’t know whether it was Dostoevsky that used the Russian equivalent, or whether the translators turned a bunch of different Russian verbs into the same English idiom over and over.