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I am not sure what the "would" in the following quote mean.

(after a lioness was shot)
At any rate she [=a lioness] got to the bush in safety, and once there, began to make such a diabolical noise as I never heard before. She would whine and shriek with pain, and then burst out into perfect volleys of roaring that shook the whole place.

Henry Rider Haggard, A Tale of Three Lions

What is the difference between "she would whine and shriek" and "she whined and shrieked" here? I appreciate your help very much.

KillingTime
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kaoru
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    In addition to what Greybeard says in his answer, there's the stronger implication of repetition with the "would" form. If Haggard had just used "whined and shrieked" it could have been interpreted as one episode of whining and shrieking. – user888379 Mar 06 '22 at 13:06
  • I think this is a Victorian-archaic use of would as a future-in-the-past construction. In the present, it would be something like: She begins to make a noise and will [go on to] whine... In the past: She began to make a noise and would [go on to] whine... – Tinfoil Hat Mar 06 '22 at 22:57

1 Answers1

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She would whine and shriek with pain,

It is style.

Haggard was writing over 100 years ago in a then middle- to upper-class English. This form with "would" was, at that time, more commonly used emphatically than it is today. It was used in order to give the reader a feeling of how the narrator was affected by, in this case, the persistent repetition of the sound and that it was coming from the lioness.

This use continues in current English in a slightly different form:

A: "Oh, this is a disaster! You would insist on trying to assemble the machine without the instructions, wouldn't you!"

This differs from " You insisted on trying to assemble the machine" in that the would insist emphasises the repeated (habitual frequent, regular, etc) insistence (to the annoyance of, or contradicting, the speaker), whilst the simple past merely implies the repetition.

Greybeard
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    Yes, but I think it still persists in the form of emphasizing the repetitive nature of a past action, and also in story telling. You could say “on a morning he went down to the shop and bought a newspaper”, but “on a morning he would go down to the shop and buy…” conveys better the habitual, even ritual, nature of the action. – David Mar 06 '22 at 14:24