Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

Hi. What are 'round shoulders'? The context in which I saw this
expression - and I doubt that it will be required here - is that in one
of Agatha Christie's novels there is a rather arrogant young man who
accosts a girl with a marriage proposal,only to be told that the girl
has already asked another man to marry him. 'He has a stomach',the
arrogant man retorts;'And I've got round shoulders',she returns, and
adds something to the effect that such superficial considerations would
not deter her. From this, it would seem that round shoulders are
supposed to make a woman less comely - though of course,opinion will be
divided on that.Also, if there are any cultural connotations associated
with this feature of physical appearance, please include descriptions
of these in your answers.
  Also, I rewrote the piece on 'inure'. I'd like it criticized again.
Here is the rewritten version. Mind that what is to be criticized is
the writing and not what is written. In fact, ignore the content
altogether.

Hi. Recently in one of my posts I said that a certain word had 'inured'
in the language and was admonished for this offbeat use of the word -
quite justly, it seemed at the time; but later, I found that I was able
to knock together a quite fair defense of this use of the word. 'Inure'
of course is familiar enough as meaning 'to accustom or harden'  in its
transitive form and 'to accrue' in its intransitive form. It is not
these meanings however, but a third one that will concern us in the
following. The O.E.D gives this meaning as 'to come into effect or
practice';.but from such uses of the word as saying that a custom had
inured through usage,it would seem that 'to assume legal force' is more
like it. Might we not then say,of a word instead of a law or custom,
that it had 'inured',meaning of course,in this context, that it had
found favour with the authorities and become legitimate,'assumed legal
force',as it were? This, then, is what I propose: Inure shall mean(in
addition to its usual meanings) 'to become recognised and accredited by
the authorities'. The proposed meaning, it may be seen, is quite close
in sense to the original 'to assume legal force' which makes the
proposal, I hope, quite reasonable. Thus, I should like to say that
1)An engineering technique has inured
2)A word has inured in a language
where the intended meaning of these expressions can be guessed from the
preceding discussion.
If this won't do at all,I should like to be availed of alternative ways
of expressing each of the above, ideally by replacing 'inured' by a
single word that will do for each occasion, or failing that, by still
replacing 'inured' with a single word in each several case(but possibly
different words for different cases),or failing that, I shall be glad
to to availed of all the alternatives by recasting the sentence you can
think of.
Thanks. And a happy new year to all.

Thanks. And a happy new year to all.