Looked a hundred times

[Johnyxxx]

Hi.

I am totally at sea what the author means by the bold text. Can anbody help me?


"I hit at the thing with a poker, and quick as thought the whole mess started sliding across the floor, stretching out as worms do, oozing under the crack beneath the door that leads onto the porch. Before I knew it the thing was gone.
"I looked at Nan. She hadn't moved, and she seemed asleep. I shook her until she opened her eyes. And her eyes looked dead. . . .
"Well, Doctor Kurt, you'll believe me when I tell you that I didn't sleep that night. I caught myself listening for noises, not that I knew what to listen for, except the sound of that thing sliding back into the house again; for I remembered that it could go through a crack! If I looked once around that kitchen, everywhere, I looked a hundred times.
"Peg didn't come back all night. That was strange, because she usually stayed right around close. It was just as though she was afraid.
"As it was just getting light Peg came up on the porch. I was glad to hear her, and I let her in quick. Then she saw Nan.

The Crawling Horror, Thorp McCluskey, 1936.


Thanks a lot.

 

[emsr2d2]

It's a type of exaggeration we use quite frequently to mean that something happened or was done many times. When telling off a child for something, having told them off for the same thing multiple times in the past, some parents say "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, don't do that!"
It's not really a hypothetical "if". It's more like saying "If I've told you once (and we both know that I definitely have) then it's also the case that I've told you a thousand times not to do that". Of course, it's entirely possible that they haven't really said it a thousand times but we can certainly extrapolate that they've said it enough times that they have lost count.

So ... in the original, we know that the person looked around the kitchen multiple times and they are trying to emphasise that fact.

 

[5jj]

If I did it once, I did it x times means that you did it many times. The idea is if I did it once, which I did, then in fact I did it x times. x is usually a large number.

 

[probus]

I can't tell you how many times my mother said to me "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times." Maybe a thousand?

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: Don't exaggerate!

 

[Tdol]

Given what they were looking for, maybe they did do a hundredth tour of the kitchen.