Imprisonment and Execution in Modern Singapore Part III of Barb's Singapore Saga

[NewUser]

Shamelessly Fawning Reviews in the Archives are More than Welcome!

If you don't have something to say, I have pre-written several gushing comments, comparing the work and author favorably with the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Goethe, Balzac, Dante, Ibsen, and Alfred E Newman. I can supply these for you to post under your name!

Don't forget Dostoevsky. He has a novel with exactly the same name.

 

[Praefectus Praetorio]

Don't forget Dostoevsky. He has a novel with exactly the same name.

View attachment 934825

I didn't forget him, I just avoid mentioning him because I can't spell his name (or the names of any of his characters)

Please edit your post to make a thumbnail not a full-size image.

 

[NewUser]

I didn't forget him, I just avoid mentioning him because I can't spell his name (or the names of any of his characters)

I just wanted to compliment you. I thought the comparison was witty. Seemed...

 

[Barbaria1]

If you don't have something to say, I have pre-written several gushing comments, comparing the work and author favorably with the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Goethe, Balzac, Dante, Ibsen, and Alfred E Newman. I can supply these for you to post under your name!

Thanks very much ... but I wrote my own.

 

[dfg42]

Well I hope you don't think I give a better appearance through artificial means - I assure you every detail is 100% me! (Though perhaps I could do with a little gingering up)

I think now you come to mention it, I have come across 'figging' as an old word for 'gingering up' horses (and of course that's the origin of that phrase too), but like most slang words the origin is obscure. Dutch vegen, German fegen, as you say, means 'sweep, polish, prink up', so might have shifted to mean making something look better than it really is (the root is 'fag-' as in Old English fager, modern 'fair', which figging ain't). But 'feague' in English, probably from that same Germanic word, had earlier meant 'beat up, sweep the floor with someone, polish them off', in rather a different sense! And then there's also the 'figge of Spain' (la figa), the rudely contemptuous gesture which the horse-trader might well give to the departing customer he's just fooled into buying a worn-out nag (hence 'not caring a fig').