The last sentence from the following paragraph from Dickens is ambiguious for me; "He was only twenty-five years old, he said, and had grown recently, for it had been found necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles. At fifteen he was a short boy, and in those days his English father and his Irish mother had rather snubbed him, as being too small of stature to sustain the credit of the family. He added that his health had not been good, though it was better now; but short people are not wanting who whisper that he drinks too hard "
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3To improve your question: look up "wanting" and "hard" and try to find meanings that fit in this sentence. Include your efforts in the question. – GEdgar Apr 18 '21 at 14:28
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idiom: to be wanting – Lambie Apr 18 '21 at 14:29
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Want here is used in the sense of be a lack of. There is no lack of short people who say privately that the young man drinks too much. I don't know whether Dickens is making some connection between alcoholism and a late growth spurt!
NB Inexpressibles is a jokey euphemism for trousers.
Kate Bunting
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@YosefBaskin I didn't say that short people didn't lack critics, I said that there was no lack of them - that is, there were plenty. Dickens sometimes made fun of very prudish people who thought that any kind of nether garment was unfit to be named, but lengthened trousers would be more visible than lengthened underwear! – Kate Bunting Apr 18 '21 at 14:48
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@KateBunting I've always understood 'inexpressibles' and 'unmentionables' to mean trousers or britches in Victorian writing. Long underwear was, I think, a late Victorian introduction. – BoldBen Apr 18 '21 at 15:19
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Thank you Ms. Kate Bunting yours seems to be the exact sense of the sentence and stands all to reason. – A. Goudarzi Apr 18 '21 at 17:21