All 3 Uses of
taint
in
Jane Eyre
- lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house — from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me — to that sky expanded before me, — a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my vein†
p. 137.7taint = to spoil something so it is not desirable
- Well then, Jane, call to aid your fancy: —suppose you were no longer a girl well reared and disciplined, but a wild boy indulged from childhood upwards; imagine yourself in a remote foreign land; conceive that you there commit a capital error, no matter of what nature or from what motives, but one whose consequences must follow you through life and taint all your existence.†
p. 251.8
- Heart-weary and soul-withered, you come home after years of voluntary banishment: you make a new acquaintance — how or where no matter: you find in this stranger much of the good and bright qualities which you have sought for twenty years, and never before encountered; and they are all fresh, healthy, without soil and without taint.
p. 252.3 *taint = anything that spoils them
Definitions:
-
(1)
(taint) to spoil something so it is not desirable -- as when bacteria contaminates a food; or as when a rumor makes people distrust a person
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely, taint is used in a non-negative way to refer to a trace of something.