regshoe

I remember trying to read Tristram Shandy once, many years ago. Maybe I should try it again, I really don't remember it at all!

And your comments about the weird digressions in eighteenth-century idiom reminds me of the podcast I listened to the other day, Lexicon Valley's episode about the Trial of Levi Weeks (the first murder trial in the nascent US, as mentioned in Hamilton, 1798); John McWhorter looked at the transcript of the trial and pointed out places where the way witnesses or lawyers spoke was very different from the way English is spoken now, and traced those usages to the roots of English, or mentioned how they persist in Black dialects but not in "mainstream" English - it was really interesting!