Think like Holmes and talk like Jane

I recall how satisfying her reaction was and it gave me a little sense of what it must be like to be Sherlock Holmes, but it was such an inadvertent feat. Talking to her, I thought she seemed a little under the weather and then I caught a whiff of cloves coming from her breath and also noticed that her words were slightly indistinct. Having had my own wisdom teeth pulled a few years previous, I knew that oil of cloves is often inserted in the now empty socket where the tooth had lived to counter painful “dry socket.”

Because of her similar age (wisdom teeth erupt when we’re young adults) and her symptoms, I made my deductions and just like Holmes, I extrapolated. (SIGN: “I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty.”) She might only have had a regular tooth extracted but how much more satisfying if I were right about it being a wisdom tooth?

My other bit of Holmesian deduction was actually more reminiscent of Mycroft than Sherlock, for I made my deductions without leaving the comfort of my armchair (well, my office chair). I was for many years a desktop publishing consultant and would often get calls from clients asking me to figure out what was going wrong. In this instance, a client asked why she kept getting blank pages appearing in her Quark XPress documents. I feared I would need to leave home and drive to her office and see what was the matter when she told me she had another call, so I was put on hold for a few minutes. When she returned, she said another blank page had appeared in her document.

I should have cried “A ha!” or “Eureka!” Instead I merely asked if her phone sat immediately to the right of her keyboard, for I had surmised that in reaching for the phone, she had accidentally hit the ENTER key with the side of her hand. In Quark XPress, pressing ENTER moves any copy after the insertion point to a new text frame and probably a new page. She thought I was a genius. I thought I was an idiot for I could have billed her if I’d driven to her office.

Sadly I have had no real moments of Austenian wit. I’ve never delivered a bon mot like, “My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.” Or, “One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.” Once while discussing an episode of Xena, Warrior Princess, a friend asked what child the union of a woman and a centaur could produce and I quipped, “A quarterhorse,” which is really something more like something James McNeill Whistler or Oscar Wilde might opine.

On another discussion, while discussing whether a mutual friend might be gay, I said it hardly didn’t matter because “Michael exists in a state of innocence and grace,” which I think comes closer to the mark. Better if I had said, “It hardly matters, my dear, for our mutual friend exists in a state of innocence and grace. We need not mention vulgar sexuality when discussing him.”

Of course when Talk Like Jane Austen Day comes around, I try to talk like Jane Austen, but as I work at home and on his work days only see my husband first thing in the morning or late at night, I have little opportunity to wax eloquent. I long to say something like, “No my dear, wanting to throw your opponent is like throwing yourself at a man. It is hardly ever effective and often ends with bruises.” Admittedly that quote is only useful if I am addressing a female aikido student when I am the sensei.

Often when I try to speak like Jane Austen, I trip on words like “éclat” or “felicity” or overuse words like “monstrous” or dispense with contractions, and I just end up sounding like Data from Star Trek.

How about you? When and where have you been able to display your Sherlockian deductions or Janeite aphorisms?