Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

welkins2139 · Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 252

the book company published a collection called: Late Wife: one of those quater-inch-think volumes whose spines you *beep* your head to read on the six-foot shelves.

what does it mean " whose spines you *beep* your head to read " ?

what is " spine " ? Is it between the front book cover and the back book cover ?

Thank you

Jintii · Joined: 18 Feb 2006 Posts: 111 Location: New York City

Yes, the spine of a book is between the front cover and the back cover. It is where the pages of the book are bound together. Usually, the title of the book is printed on the spine (as well as on the front cover). When a book is very thin, like a quarter-inch thick as in your sentence, it can be difficult to read the title on the spine from far away.

Sometimes *beep* or *bleep* is used to replace a bad word. It's like the sound they used to use on TV when someone used a bad word; the TV censors would make a noise like "beep" or "bleep" to cover the bad word so that no one would hear it.

In your article, the original version of the sentence (it's from Newsweek, right?) used the phrase "...one of those quarter-inch-thick volumes whose spines you *beep* your head to read..." In this sentence, *beep* means turn or tilt to one side. But it has another meaning which is vulgar. So the software that you are using to read the article replaced *beep* with *beep* so that you wouldn't see a bad word. The problem is that in this case, it was not a bad word, and it made it hard for you to understand the sentence.