0

What does it mean? Wells's short story The Door in the Wall

I was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still attainable things.

Improve this question
3
  • Do you understand it if we remove "no end of" from the text? That's what makes it hard to understand for me. There's possible support for "no end" being an outdated version of "to no end", but of course we still have the "of" to deal with. motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/…
    – cruthers
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 2:00
  • 2
    Whadya mean, outdated? I've never heard 'to no end', but no end of seems normal enough to me.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 8:23
  • @KateBunting - as discussed in the other comment, it's the particular use of "no end of" (followed by "a") that's the issue, not the existence of "no end of."
    – cruthers
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 15:01

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

No end of is an idiom meaning "to an infinite degree", or more prosaically "very".

So it means thinking myself very much a man of the world.

If you're having difficulty with thinking myself ..., that can be paraphrased as thinking of myself as being very much a man of the world.

Improve this answer
6
  • Have you ever heard someone use "no end of" like Wells does here, i.e. followed by an indefinite article and countable noun?
    – cruthers
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 3:54
  • Certainly, @cruthers, though it's dated. The iWeb corpus has only 12 instances. COHA (the Corpus of Historical American English) shows it peaking in the 1880s, and dead by 1940.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 4:04
  • 1
    @cruthers - it was common enough in my 1960s UK childhood, and still perfectly understandable, especially to anyone whose reading is not confined to the very contemporary and informal. Fairly recent joke (1980s): if you have been neither the front end nor the rear end of a pantomime donkey, then you have been no end of an ass! ('Ass' means 'donkey' in BrE).
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 8:58
  • @MichaelHarvey, aha, got it. This is absent from AmE. We use "no end of" - but only followed by plural or uncountable singular, and has a closer to literal (albeit hyperbolic) meaning - i.e., "there will be no end of the outpouring/wails of grief when he dies."
    – cruthers
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 14:58
  • 1
    @cruthers - well, you could say that 'he is no end of a decent fellow' suggests (hyperbolically) that a list of his good qualities, which could, in principle, be made, would have no end'.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 15:07

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .