Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / February 2006

Hello, all!

Could somebody explain, may be with examples, the meaning of the word
"swordsman" in the fragment quoted below?

""""""   He had been extraordinary in his ability to get along with
Mackenzie King without wrangling and without any obvious sacrifice of his
own opinions, which were not often those of the P.M. But there was another
reputation that came home with him, a reputation spoken of less freely, with
an ambiguity I did not understand or even notice for a time. This was a
reputation as something called "a swordsman".

It is a measure of my innocence that I took this word at its face value. It
was new then in the connotation it has since acquired, and I was proud of my
father being a swordsman. I assumed it meant a gallant, cavalier?like
person, a sort of Prince Rupert of the Rhine as opposed to the Cromwellian
austerity of Mackenzie King.

When boys at school talked to me about Father, as they did because he was
increasingly a public figure, I sometimes said, "You can sum him up pretty
much in a word-a swordsman." I now remember with terrible humiliation that I
said this to the Wolffs, who received it calmly, though I thought I saw Mr.
Wolffs nostrils pinch and if I had been more sensitive I would surely have
noticed a drop in the social temperature. """"

Thanks