fluent at last in the languages of the sea

So there's this meme - several memes - going round about personal canon for characters, and I'm bored, so:

( Addison Forbes Montgomery, 'Grey's Anatomy' )

( Margia Stevens, 'The Chalet School' )

"I'm fed up!" observed Evadne one day, shortly after Mr Denny had made his debut at the Chalet School. "I think Gisela is right-down mean!"

"Why!" demanded Margia, who was sitting on the top of her desk, swinging her legs. "What's she done to you?"

"Fined me!"

"Oh! Why? Was it slang?"

"You know real well it was! I think she's a... a rubber-necked four flusher!" From Jo at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, chapter nine.


I love that while EBD had Madge and the prefects condemning slang, I learn all sorts of fun new phrases from her books. I've learned from google that rubber-neck means to "look about or survey with unsophisticated wonderment or curiosity" and a four-flusher is "a pretentious person; fraud; bluffer". I'm not likely to go around calling people rubber-necked four flushers, but I shall think it on appropriate occasions.

So, apparently I have issues dealing with change in books. I've been buying Chalet School books cheap for a few months and now I'm finally getting around to reading them. It seems I don't want to read any books past the move away from the Tyrol, because I have apparently decided that the CS books can only be CS books if they're at the Tiernsee, with the san at the Sonnalpe, and with Margia Stevens/Evadne Lannis/Ilonka Barkocz/Elsie Carr* and co as the middles. I can live with the babying and near-deification of the Robin for all that.

It's kind of stupid, because even if I'm reading about the school in England or the school in Switzerland, any time I want I can pick up one of the earlier books and the school will still be at the Tiernsee and the middles will still be the middles, keeping Biddy O'Ryan in the games shed, disgracing themselves at Oberammergau, and getting their heads stuck in chair backs.

It shouldn't matter. I mean, they're books. But then, I get upset over the strangest things.

* Also, Elsie Carr? I'd love for this to be Katy Carr's sister Elsie, but there's a few decades between the two series so probably not. But she could be a niece or something...