Thanks, James. Nick Antosca’s first quotation from Lolita includes that mood-killing technical word, NATES, which, unsurprisingly, 12-year-old Nick has to look up. Alas, NATES still rhymes with GRATES in my affronted Anglophonic soul. Unless you pronounce NATES as \nartays\, the Latin plural of NATIS, which is, presumably. just one singular, turn-the-other-cheek bum.
If the use of NATES is to suggest a surgical lexicon/mindset for Humbert, why does VN use the everyday English
SHOULDER-BLADES in the same passage, rather than the matching cold-medical OMOPLATES (found elsewhere. e.g., in The Original of Laura, about which Jansy and I have had several exchanges)?
Nick and I, and most honest males, see Lolita with a sweet, young, out-of-bounds ass. Her nates belong with her glutæus maximus (suitably pluralized) on some Gray’s (not Grey’s) Anatomy Dissection Table.
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
On 21/10/2010 17:13, "James Twiggs" <jtwigzz@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
THE PARIS REVIEW
DEPARTMENT OF SEX ED <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/category/department-of-sex-ed/>
Reading Lolita at Twelve
October 1, 2010 | by Nick Antosca <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/nantosca/>
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/10/01/reading-lolita-at-twelve/