Two Inns And A Tatterdemalion

An English Teacher once told me that my daughter's vocabulary showed how much reading she did. We can pick up an incomplete understanding of a word's meaning merely from the contexts in which it is used. Let me list just four of the guests at a busy night in the Old Phoenix:

"...lean pipe-smoking Victorian and his slightly lame companion, wide-eyed freckle-faced boy and Negro man in tatterdemalion farm clothes..."

-Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Epilogue, p. 228.

First, we recognize these four. Secondly, from this and perhaps other contexts, I had picked up the idea that "tatterdemalion" was an adjective. Having re-encountered the word today, I wondered precisely what it meant. My Chambers Dictionary informs me that:

"Tatter" is a noun, meaning "a torn shred" or "a loose hanging rag";

"To tatter" is a transitive verb, meaning "to tear to tatters";

"To tatter" can also be an intransitive verb, meaning "to fall into tatters";

"Tattered" and "tattery" are adjectives, meaning "ragged";

"Tatterdemalion" is a noun, meaning "a ragged fellow."

"Tatterdemalion" is a noun in the passage that I have just read:

"We had to find one child, one helpless tatterdemalion among so many others, and if Holmes was right, if there was danger abroad, we had no time to spare."

-Anthony Horowitz, The House Of Silk (Leicester, 2012), 6, pp. 91-92.

Coincidence: Holmes and "tatterdemalion" in a single sentence in both works.

Two other points. First, Anderson describes the pipe-smoking Victorian's companion as slightly lame and, in "Time Patrol," states that the private agent's companion has a limp. I read in the Introduction to a Sherlock Holmes omnibus that Watson seemed unsure whether the jezail bullet had hit his arm or his leg. On p. 1 of The House Of Silk, Horowitz/Watson writes "...shoulder..."

Secondly, the scene in the Old Phoenix ends with Valeria Matuchek signing off:

"'Enough. I hope you've enjoyed my story.'" (p. 229)

This recalls Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End:

Mister Gaheris: There.

Mister Gaheris: That's my tale told. Who's next?

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 41, panels 5-6.