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That young girl," he added unexpectedly, "is one of the least benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."



Please correct me if I am an imbecile, but, doesn't this just mean: "She is the least stupid young girl I have had the displeasure of meeting"? That's not that obfusatory, is it? Just a kind of damnation with the faintest imaginable praise.




The character in question was utterly incapable of uttering any complimentary remarks about anyone or anything. This was as close as he could come.



It's one thing to understand the sentence while reading it. Understanding it while having it fly by one's ears is quite different.



That was the real skill of Adams' writing, though. The books were quite different from the radio series. I have the entire series of both, and am as sure as I can be that the above paragraph from the book is NOT in the radio series. The scripts for the radio series were designed to be as funny to listen to as the books were to read, but they were certainly not identical. There are many instances where my eager expectation of hearing some favourite lines from the books was disappointed. Also now I find myself remembering a certain line, and scouring my books for them, only to realise that they must have been from the radio series.

noho ora mai
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