"hard" - word

[szaroczek]

Again in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" narrator is describing some tree confessing that:

"It was connected with the tragical story of the unfortunate Andre, who had been taken prisoner hard by it, and it was universally known by the name of Major Andre's tree."

I would gladly enjoy the sentence without this "hard" word in it... Yet it's still there. For some reason perhaps... I went throw my dictionary looking for the meanings of the mentioned word but non didn't seem to match. Some help, please... !

[bhaisahab]

Again in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" narrator is describing some tree confessing that:

"It was connected with the tragical story of the unfortunate Andre, who had been taken prisoner hard by it, and it was universally known by the name of Major Andre's tree."

I would gladly enjoy the sentence without this "hard" word in it... Yet it's still there. For some reason perhaps... I went throw my dictionary looking for the meanings of the mentioned word but non didn't seem to match. Some help, please... !

"Hard by" means "very close to".

[szaroczek]

Man, what a strange meaning! How one could guess! It seems like totally no suggestions coming from the meanings of the component words toward the final meaning of the expression! All the more thank you for the help.

[bhaisahab]

Man, what a strange meaning! How one could guess! It seems like totally no suggestions coming from the meanings of the component words toward the final meaning of the expression! All the more thank you for the help.

The joys of English.

[szaroczek]

Exactly! By the way, is this meaning of this expression still in use in contemporary common English or maybe it just... died out with honorable W. Irving himself...? In other words should I strive to acquire it and possibly use it in everyday conversations or just know about it in a case of... having to read this Irving's fairy tail again some day?

[5jj]

It's probably not too common. Of the first 100 citations of 'hard by' in COCA, only four had this meaning. (Most of the others were 'hit hard by...'..

[Barb_D]

If it makes you feel better, most modern readers would struggle with a lot of the same words that are tripping you up.

An unrelated comment: We used to play Sleepy Hollow in field hockey, if we won our division and they won theirs. The town wasn't called Sleepy Hollow then, though. They changed their name some time during my lifetime.

[szaroczek]

Thanks friends, it "makes me feel better".