To the manor born
"It is infortunate that the idomatic use, while it comes by nature to southern Englishmen (who will find most of this section superfluous), is so complicated that those who are not to the manner born...
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Seems to me that he used "manner" because it meant what he intended: "Customary mode of acting or behaviour; habitual practice; usage, custom, fashion" (quoting the OED2's definition of this...
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Then if Dickens got it wrong, was he intending a word play? If the OED suggests it was an error, they probably think it was not a word play. Maybe Dickens heard the line spoken and jumped to the wrong...
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Straining credulity is right. No commentators on Shakespeare have ever suggested that he is punning in this line.
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>> Cites from OED2 in the thread include a Charles Dickens' 1847 reference "to the manor born" which OED calls an erroneous rendition of Hamlet's lineAmazon's search facility did not find any...
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Does the latter, "to the manor born", version mean "native", same as the original, or does it mean "born with a silver spoon"? I've always taken it to be the latter, but that may be the result of one...
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I'd say the latter, wg: the silver spoon (as in crested cutlery belonging to the aristocracy).
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Having till now thought that the pun was invented for the TV series, I am impressed that 'manor' has such a long history of use. In fact it makes more sense these days, since that shade of meaning of...
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>the ordinary sense of 'manor' would make perfect sense in the original.Sense could be forced on it, but hardly "perfect"; it clearly doesn't fit as well as "manner". Consider the phrase in...
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Well I think that's rather my point. We blithely assume it's 'manner' = 'custom' because that's in there and that's how we've always understood it. But really, it's a little below the Bill...
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Quote:You could even imagine a changeling being introduced in the First FolioThe First, or Bad, Quarto, a pirated edition which makes a dog's breakfast of much of the text, reads maner.The Second...
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In the same spirit as ozzie's and Sir H's comments, perhaps "they... with swinish phrase soil our addition" is acutally a pun on "edition", and was Will's prescient comment on the tendency of later...
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It seems that in 1449, manor and manner were both maner. Lordys! sich spaullynge, sich punnes.
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I don't know when the actual double pronunciation of double consonants ceased, but in manner it's only orthographic, not original. It's from something like French manière, Latin root man-. There was...
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We hear of Manor Houses in England, and I have always taken "To the Manor Born" to be born to the style (manner) of living that that brought with it. We have 'manner' being spelt 'manner' in...
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If these transcripts are to be trusted, 'manor' (the estate) is used in 1537; 'manor and maner' (two or three? of the second) for the same in 1429; and quite a few more such pre-WS's to be found...
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The dedication of so much mental effort to justify what is obviously an error is starting to remind me of those fanboy discussions devoted to explaining things like how Superman can pick up a whole...
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why the phaser beams from the Enterprise are always diverging as they leave the ship but converging when they hit the target.Yes, why do they?lol, DrT!
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Dr T.Add `psychic' to your skills. On re-reading, not my best work. I was suggesting a possible change in how the word was spelt, even if its meaning and pronunciation hadn't.The theory only worked if...
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