shootingstar
Member
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2022
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- German
- Home Country
- Germany
- Current Location
- Germany
My mother's family was Scotch, and it was judged fitting I should pay a visit, on my way Paris ward, to my uncle Adam Loudon, a wealthy retired grocer of Edinburgh. He was very stiff and ironical; he fed me well, lodged me sumptuously, and seemed to take it out of me all the time, cent per cent, in secret entertainment which caused his spectacles to glitter and his mouth to twitch. The ground of his ill-suppressed mirth (as well as I could make out) was simply the fact that I was an American. "Well," he would say, drawing out the word to infinity "and I suppose now in your country things will be so and so." And the whole group of my cousins would titter joyously. Repeated receptions of this sort must be at the root, I suppose, of what they call the Great American Jest; and I know I was myself goaded into saying that my friends went naked in the summer months, and that the Second Methodist Episcopal Church in Muskegon was decorated with scalps. I cannot say that thee flights had any great success; they seemed to awaken little more surprise than the fact that my father was a Republican . . .
(R. L. Stevenson, The Wrecker, Chapter II, Roussillon Wine)
What is the meaning of the word "Jest" there? I think it has an AE meaning but I can't decipher it, I'm afraid. What is the author trying to say with the sentence "Repeated receptions of this sort must be at the root . . . of what they call the Great American Jest;" . . . Who is meant by "they" there? Is it his Scotch family or is it a generalized "you"?
(R. L. Stevenson, The Wrecker, Chapter II, Roussillon Wine)
What is the meaning of the word "Jest" there? I think it has an AE meaning but I can't decipher it, I'm afraid. What is the author trying to say with the sentence "Repeated receptions of this sort must be at the root . . . of what they call the Great American Jest;" . . . Who is meant by "they" there? Is it his Scotch family or is it a generalized "you"?