Abstract
41 AM AFRAID you are very tired, Fanny,' says Edmund to his cousin as they I seat themselves on a shaded bench overlooking the ha-ha on the pleasant grounds of Sotherton. 'This will be a bad day's amusement for you, if you are to be up.' In this country a quite different meaning of up is so pervasive that the American reader of Jane Austen's novel finds it hard not to smile at the phrasing of Edmund's solicitude. For the solicitude itself there is ample reason. Poor Fanny is not strong--every sort of exercise except horseback riding fatigues her. And five times throughout Mansfield Park Jane Austen threatens her with this dismal consequence of unwise exertion.' Every Baedeker to American English warns the traveler of this phrasesome coyly, some forthrightly. None has improved on Mark Twain's comment to his British traveling companion: 'When you are exhausted, you say you are knocked up. We don't.'2 The iniplication of the 'We don't' cannot have been generally understood by the British public of the middle of last
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