[Dragaera] I reviewed Hawk. :-/

[Jon Lincicum via Dragaera]

----- Original Message -----

> From: "Philip Hart via Dragaera" <dragaera at lists.dragaera.info>
> To: "Dragaera at lists.dragaera.info" <dragaera at lists.dragaera.info>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 5, 2014 2:21:15 PM
> Subject: Re: [Dragaera] I reviewed Hawk. :-/

> On Wed, 5 Nov 2014, Mark Landin via Dragaera wrote:

> > Or maybe "hamstring the yendi" is some figure of speech that has cultural
> > significance, but isn't immediately clear to us non-Dragareans. Maybe read
> > like "Sethra was supposed to jump the shark, but pulled up at the last
> > second-deliberately".

> If it's an idiom I would naively expect it to mean, "Try to do something
> impossible" or "make a spiteful pointless gesture".  Which would make its
> use in this context especially ironic.

  
Hmm. I had always just seen the presence of the word 'yendi' in that line as merely an epithet, and separate as a concept from the preceeding bit which I'd assumed was a quite literal hamstringing of Dolivar. 

You raise a good point, however. It would be very difficult to literally hamstring a yendi, given that they do not have legs. This /would/ work very well as a euphemisum for a very difficult or impossible task. 

In the context of the original quote, given this meaning, it would seem to me that "being ordered to do what is impossible but deliberately missing" could mean being ordered to kill Dolivar, or possibly to force a confession, but deliberately failing. This doesn't seem to change the meaning significantly of the part of the phrase in question.

"We caught the criminal, and the warden of his prison was ordered to twixilcate the flapinaxitrix, but he deliberately failed, and the convict escaped."

The meanings of the nonsense words here do not change the base fact that something the warden did resulted in a significant change in the convict's favor, ultimately sparing his life. The kinds of prisons where they torture you don't tend to be ones where you get released after a brief stay with time off for good behavior...

--Majikjon