‘But we haven’t got a bed-post,’ said my husband captiously when I had shared a confidence between him, me and the bedpost.
‘But we haven’t got a bed-post,’ said my husband captiously when I had shared a confidence between him, me and the bedpost. I left the room to turn down the stock on the gas-stove.
With Dickens, I have since discovered, or with Miss La Creevy, the miniature-painter in Nicholas Nickleby, it was ‘between you and me and the post’. That was in 1839. Others have it as gatepost or lamp post. The unhearing, unspeaking reliability of posts is the point, the exception being a listening-post.
My real interest is with between. Some people don’t like between to be applied to more than two things. But what of inserting a needle between the closed petals of a flower, an example given by the clever men at Oxford in their 20-volume English Dictionary? Indeed they become quite chatty on the subject.
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