I’ve been re-reading What Maisie Knew in an old edition without notes. I hadn’t appreciated how convoluted and mannered the prose style is, nor (what nobody says) that it is meant to be funny.
At any rate can someone clarify the following passage? (What “the word” may be is irrelevant.)
“The word stuck in her mind and contributed to her feeling from this time that she was deficient in something that would meet the general desire. She found out what it was; it was a congenital tendency to the production of a substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name painfully associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she didn’t like.”
What is the painful name?