10. Darcy: I’m sure you’ve read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, but if perchance your education never dragged you through that book and you’ve not compensated since – by reading the book, watching the television series or playing the video game – here’s the story:
Elizabeth Bennet (Madame Prejudice) is one of five daughters who are stuck with a tough-luck-you’re-female problem. Their father’s property is entailed to a male heir upon his death, and there is no such heir. So they will be turned out of their house to fend for themselves unless they can find suitably wealthy husbands. Elizabeth runs into the haughty Fitzwilliam Darcy (Mister Pride.) They instantly dislike each other, he treating her as not-worth-a-dance-at-the-local-ho-down and she reacting with a who-the-flock-do-you-think-you-are. To cut a long story short, many things happen, then Mr Pride falls in love with Madame Prejudice, but she rejects his proposal of marriage. Then some more things happen and Madame Prejudice falls in love with Mr Pride and she accepts his second proposal. They get married.
If you read the novel and enjoyed it, you will, no doubt, see the sense in rating people’s pride based on the overall unit of the Darcy, just as, in the movie 10, Dudley Moore used a decimal scale to rate the beauty of Bo Derek. One is “not much of a Darcy” with 10 being “the full Darcy.” But the Brit in me argues for a more comprehensive measuring system. Indeed, we could employ the Swaledale sheep counting numbers – a 1 to 20 scale with a dick being a half-darcy, a bumfit being a three-quarter darcy and a jigget being the full darcy.
Unfortunately there is no such unit for assessing pride. The darcy is geological. It’s a unit that measures the permeability of rock. Rock with a permeability of 1 darcy permits a flow of 1 cubic centimeter per second of a fluid with viscosity of 1 cP under a pressure gradient of 1 atmosphere per centimeter acting across an area of one centimeter. Unfortunately, although it sounds otherwise, the darcy is prosaic and mundane.
Also:
10 Curse Words You Don’t Know
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Nonsense Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Words You Didn’t Know Were American Indian Words
Click here for the full list: Words You Dont Know
Click here to BUY the book: Words You Don’t Know on Amazon
~ Albert Einstein
