Sam and Frodo

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

if you are insinuating i underline words in the dictorary because they amuse me then think again, im not some 10 year old little boy here. And i havnt read Hamlet, so i cant say your quote means anything to me: but that aside no i did not find it funny.

Steady on, old fellow. You said yourself that

It has been mentioned 2 me several times now, much to my disgust

so I couldn't have been referring to your good self when I was talking about the originators of the "gay subtext" theory. There's nothing immature or stupid about coming to a forum with a theory that's been presented to you and asking if it's true, which is what you've done. If I tell you that the idea is, IMNESHO* complete drivel, composed by a childish obsessive, that's not intended as a personal slight against you, but against the person who came up with the idea in the first place; someone who probably only invented it to annoy Tolkien fans anyway. Besides that, when I want to insult someone I don't muck about with implications; I insult them properly. Fellow Metallica fans rarely require such treatment.

That being understood, it is possible to behave like a schoolboy without actually being one, and this is what I was trying to suggest about these obscure third-parties. People say the same things about any given group of male friends in literature from Tolkien to the Biggles books and I've never seen it as anything but childish (not that this stops it being funny; I like a bit of childish humour as much as anyone).

It doesn't really matter, but the Shakespeare stands on its own: my reference was to the word "bodkin", which some people misunderstand (often deliberately) as a familiar version of "body" or a phallic euphamism. There's an example of the former in the Woody Allen film Everything you ever wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask, which is a case in point for my funny-in-its-place theory.

*In My Not Even Slightly Humble Opinion