There's method in his madness

[Belly T]

Does result here means "reason"?

[hamilton_g20]

Originally Posted by Belly T

It's not easy to understand the definition of the link above , they "manage to get the result" (-cite) , what does it mean ?

It means " There is often a plan behind a person’s apparently inexplicable behavior "

Based on a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

[knowledge]

Hi! I have read this in Hamlet Drama :)

[David L.]

Does it occur to anyone else, that there is a profound difference between "method in his madness" and "method to his madness"??
Can anyone else detect it?
It seems to me, that people just toss off speech in conversation. They're happy to settle for some 'general idea' that passes for human communication. rather than language conveying nuances of meaning. "How did you like the book/the concert/the lecture?" "It was cool". !!! The last resource of the inarticulate.
Are we all hurtling towards the day we are reduced to the level of, "He was talking about things and stuff."

[Tdol]

Would't that choice be dictated by the degree of the method and how far in controlled the madness?

[abra]

How old in fact is the structure
'There's more to it than that...'
'There are many advantages to doing this job' ( a line from the textbook I am using)...
David, what's the difference that you see between "method in his madness" and "method to his madness"
Regards,
Elena

[David L.]

David, what's the difference that you see between "method in his madness" and "method to his madness"
Thank you for asking,Elena

Let's say the person tackling a problem is John so we don't get confused with all the 'he's'.
method in his madness: to the observer, John's way of going about performing some task is so radically different, and doesn't seem to be tackling it head on, but in some obscure roundabout way. However, if John explained exactly why he was doing it his way, one might then appreciate John has a very good and sensible reason for doing it that way - what seemed like a mad approach was actually very constructive. In John's mind, his goal is to deal with the task and John believes he is going about it the best way, or at least, it seems a good approach to him. He was being methodical in his goal-orientated behaviour that only seemed madness to others.

method to his madness: Some years ago, I was engaged in assessing people who claimed to have suffered intellectual and memory impairment after head injury. Depending on the degree of this impairment, and so, the degree of brain injury that must have been sustained to cause this degree of impairment, the person would be in line for a very large sum of money for compensation. It was easy to tell those that were faking. Their method of trying to present themselves as impaired was to respond to tests as if they now had a global difficulty doing and remembering things, whereas in genuine patients, there is selective impairment - some things are impaired, others remain intact even after severe brain injury.
Similarly, an experiment was done were students tried to get themselves admitted to psychiatric hospitals by faking mental illness. However, they were detected because the way they went about pretending they were ill didn't correspond to what is usually seen in particular kinds of patients. Their method in trying to fake was to pretend to hear voices, have imaginary conversations, talk about martians persecuting them, sit slumped in a chair for a while as if profoundly depressed, then jump around acting in a manic fashion etc. Here, the goal was to appear to be mad, and they had to have some way of going about it that they thought would fool the doctors. Their goal was the appearance of madness itself, and there was method to their madness!

[RonBee]

Originally Posted by abra

David, what's the difference that you see between "method in his madness" and "method to his madness"

I think it's just an AE/BE difference. The two expressions mean the same thing.

~R

[abra]

Thanks, David and RonBee.

Sorry about repeating my question:

'There's more to it than that...'
'There are many advantages to doing this job' ( a line from the textbook I am using)...

Are the above sentences also AmE?

Thanks in advance.

[RonBee]

Originally Posted by abra

Thanks, David and RonBee.

Sorry about repeating my question:

'There's more to it than that...'
'There are many advantages to doing this job' ( a line from the textbook I am using)...

Are the above sentences also AmE?

It looks like it to me. Regarding the second sentece, "There are many advantages to doing it this way" seems more likely. Of course, the sentence in question would probably make more sense within its proper context.

(If you wish to talk about a new subject, please start a new thread.)

~R