Kingsley Amis

From “Lucky Jim”

O

n the florid black hall stand there were a couple of periodicals and some letters that had come by the second post. There was something in a typed envelope for Alfred Beesly, who was a member of the College's English Department; a buff envelope containing football-pool coupons and addressed to W. Atkinson, an insurance salesman, some years older than Dixon, and another typed envelope addressed to J. Dickinson with a London postmark. He hesitated, then opened it. Inside was a sheet hastily torn from a pad bearing a few ill-written lines in green ink. Without for­mality the writer announced that he'd liked the shipbuilding article and proposed to publish it "in due course". He'd be writing again "before very long" and signed himself, "L.S. Caton".

                Dixon took a felt hat of Atkinson's from the hall stand, put it on his head and did a little dance in the narrow hall. Welch would find it harder to sack him now. It was good apart from that; it was generally encouraging; perhaps the article had some merit after all. No, that was going too far; but it did mean it was the right sort of stuff, and a man who'd written one lot of the right sort of stuff could presumably write more. He replaced the hat, glancing idly at the periodicals which were destined for Evan Johns, office worker at the college and amateur oboist. The front page of one of them bore a large and well-produced photograph of a contemporary composer Johns might rea­sonably be supposed to admire. An idea came into Dixon's mind, which was the more ready to receive it in this mood of exultation. He stood still and listened for a moment, then crept into the dining room, where the table was laid for high tea. Working quickly but carefully, he began alter­ing the composer's face with a soft black pencil. The lower lip he turned into a set of discoloured snaggle teeth, adding another lower lip, thicker and looser than the original, underneath. Duelling scars appeared on the cheeks, hairs as thick as tooth picks sprang from the widened nostrils, the eyes, enlarged and converging, spilled out on to the nose. After crenellating the jawline and hiding the forehead in a luxuriant fringe, he added a Chinese moustache and pirate's earrings, and had just replaced the paper on the hall stand when somebody began to come in by the front door.

Notes and exercises:

1.     Memorize the spelling of the following words: amateur, masseur, connoisseur, chauffeur, grandeur, saboteur.

2.     Do not confuse the word exultation (great joy, triumph) with exaltation [egzo:l´teiò(¶)n] (elation, state of spiritual delight, glorification). The following pairs of words are also confused quite often. Learn how to spell them and show the difference in their meaning:

þ    Judicial, economic, childish, imperial, continual

þ    Judicious, economical, childlike, imperious, continuous

þ    Prudent, historic, epigram, incredulous, contemptible

þ    Prudish, historical, epigraph, incredible, contemptuous

þ    Goal, illegible, effect, effective, licence

þ    Gaol, eligible, affect, efficient, license

þ    Ingenuous, human, imminent, story, punctual

þ    Ingenious, humane, eminent, storey, punctilious

þ    Esteem, sensible, genus, popular, Austria

þ    Estimate, sensitive, genius, populous, Australia

3.     Word study:

the (football) pools             organized gambling on the results of football matches: I’m hoping to win a fortune on the pools.

buff                                        dull yellow colour

felt                                          wool, hair or fur, compressed and rolled flat into a kind of cloth: felt hats, felt slippers

high tea                                 tea with meat, fish or the like, as opposed to plain tea

4.     Translate the following expressions and use them in sentences of your own:

in due course, on the upper/lower course of a river, the course of life, to change one’s course, to enter on the course of, to start on a course of, to lay/set a course for, to keep/hold one’s course, to let things take their course, to steer/tread a steady course, to take one’s own course, (in) the course of events, the course of nature, in course of construction (under construction), in the course of, a matter of course, to take a drastic course, a course of lectures, refresher course, a correspondence course, to go through a course, to follow courses, to run courses, a course of X-ray treatment, to take a course of medicine, a course of injections, a dinner of three courses, to walk over the course;

to write the right sort of stuff, his poems are poor stuff, sob stuff, green stuff, sweet stuff, doctor’s stuff, hot stuff, all stuff, stuff and nonsense, that’s the stuff!, we must see what stuff he’s made of, there’s good stuff in him, to stuff one’s fingers into one’s ears, to stuff oneself, my nose is stuffed, a stuffed bird, a stuffed pepper, to knock the stuffing out of someone