I was all set to respond in this thread, but the lurve was seemingly causing everyone to throw up, so a new thread must suffice (with a bit of context):
ETF, it’s good to see there are some Dickens readers on the other side of the pond. Not his best known book either. Kudos to you. A horsey type with a brain - almost unheard of in my home country!
Aw, shucks. :: digs toe shyly into manure pile ::
What can I say? I’m just an undeconstructed avariciously voracious reader, especially of authors given to long, convoluted sentences with a plethora of clauses, writers of prose which requires close attention rather than casual skimming – the sort of perusal merited by the plodding clangs of Hemingway wannabes – and whose plots, descriptions, and development of scenes speak to a literary cast of mind rather than the quick-cut cinematic jigginess permeating popular culture.
Besides, elucidator used it first. 
Sorry - skipped all that.
Indeed he did, and a surprisingly effective [post=5814306]thread-killer[/post] it’s proven to be too. When it’s not [post=5697684]bamboozling[/post] lesser types.
Perhaps it can be adopted as the SDMB shibboleth to distinguish the literarati from those who prefer Grisham, Crichton, Eliot or Pound.
So that’s how my name came to be connected with those recondite allusions? I was curious why Roger had apparently suddenly formed this strong sense of repulsion for me, but couldn’t figure it out…
But I had every confidence that something would eventually turn up.
LOL. Are you owning up to being in the Grisham/Crichton camp or the Eliot/Pound ‘congregation’?
Oh.
I was so hoping the reference was to roger.
But then I guess I misunderstood roger’s comment about Polycarp.
Not only am I distinguished from the literarati as defined by roger, but I don’t care for Grisham/Crichton and I’m picky about Eliot/Pound.
Somehow I had never considered Dickens to be the great Determiner.
Guess I’m miffed. Or maybe…
I am bored.
I just received a mysterious email from someone I take to be a Doper, pointing out that the reference is not from Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, but from Catch-22.
Elucidator, where are you? Come in here and live up to your name!
No offence meant to the modern-day “Polycarp”. When the guest poster drove by to say that would-be saints should follow Polycarp around, I felt not his pain, but his embarrassment. Knowing that Polycarp could hardly respond to this type of cyber-stalking, I took it, perhaps unwisely, in retrospect, upon myself to do so.
Rats.
My “I am bored” Dickens pun has gone unappreciated.
And it’s from one of the Dickens books that I’ve actually read, I note (having googled furiously). Mind you, had I not accepted the challenge and done a bit of REE-search (as you Americans like to say), the thread would have gradground to a halt in dedlock.