Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon “the unattractive exterior of Farfrae’s erection” or in Bleak House, where Dickens writes that “Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates.” [Taken from “Red Pants,” by Robert M. Sebastian, in the Winter 1989 issue of Verbatim.] This drift of meaning can happen
Much to the delight of those with a school boy’s heart. I count myself there.
