Talk:aliquant

Figural usage (in English)

I've encountered a figural and even metaphorical use of the adjective form, and it is not covered here:

Most things that I bite that hard come clean off in my mouth. But what a surprise! For I found when I tried to reopen my jaw that it would not budge. I try once again to bite my way free, but find I’m stuck. Too late I realize that the rice-cake is a fiend. When a man who has fallen into a marsh struggles to escape, the more he thrashes about trying to extract his legs, the deeper in he sinks. Just so, the harder I clamp my jaws, the more my mouth grows heavy and my teeth immobilized. I can feel the resistance to my teeth, but that’s all. I cannot dispose of it. Waverhouse, the aesthete, once described my master as an aliquant man and I must say it’s rather a good description. This rice-cake too, like my master, is aliquant. It looked to me that, however much I continued biting, nothing could ever result: the process could go on and on eternally like the division of ten by three. In the middle of this anguish I found my second truth: that all animals can tell by instinct what is or is not good for them. Although I have now discovered two great truths, I remain unhappy by reason of the adherent rice-cake.

(Emphasis added.) This is from I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki (1906), translated (with remarkable English fluency and depth) by Yasotarō Mōri. The cat narrator is describing a left-over rice-cake as aliquant, seeming to mean that it is an indivisible sticky mass that remains a sticky mass regardless of chewing effort.

It's note quite clear what the implication about the head of the household is, though. He's generally described as a somewhat lazy and "homebody" school teacher, who is both arrogant and gullible, and prone to obsessive–compulsive behavior with his obsessions tending to be rather short-lived but intense. My best guess is that the reference is to him being not easily "divided" from what he's made his mind up about and is obsessing over, but it's unclear without some additional metaphoric uses to which to compare it.
— SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 02:14, 13 February 2020 (UTC)