About half through Crime and Punishment and feeling like I'm getting the hang of The Dostoevsky Code. For example, if a character, appearing on stage for the first time, is described as "fashionably dressed," or "well pomaded," or "with an elaborate toilet," or "carefully coifed," you can be sure that in time it will be revealed that she (or he) is in addition an asshole and a reprobate.
The general topic puts me in mind of Kent's spectacular takedown of the contemptible Oswald in King Lear:
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition . . . .
Draw, you rogue, for though it be night, yet the moon shines. I'll make a sop o' th' moonshine of you. You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!
A cullion is a base or ignoble fellow and, etymologically, is from the Latin word for scrotum ("coleus"). And "barbermonger"! Always going to the barber and therefore continuous with a glass-gazing finical rogue.
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