Jansy Mello: “She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!”

(Ada)

One of my grandkids was telling me about her sister’s visit to an optician. The little girl hadn’t yet learned her letters and so his optometric test couldn’t rely on the alphabet, but demanded a special chart with images of varying sizes. Unfortunately small Elena was unable to describe what she saw. Her parents’s worries about her eye-sight were assuaged only after they saw the chart themselves.  The optometrist was exhibiting pictures of dial phones, analogic wall clocks, Hi-Fi sound systems, VHS,  cassettes, typing machines and she’d never seen any of these objects before! Her “blindness” was of a different order.  We’d been also chatting about panties, bloomers and slips when I remembered a sentence in “ADA,” with her sophisticated remark that “her Latin was showing”, obviously linked to the expression “my slip is showing” - which I feared must now be on the way to become an archaic expression. I checked it with the google and noticed that young people already wonder about its meaning.* Soon the volume of “Annotations” to VN’s novels will have to be increased…

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*-  “ In the olden days, girls wear petticoat, out of modesty and / or because their skirt was 'transparent'. This petticoat is also referred to as 'slip'. So, the above expression simply means that the 'slip' or petticoat was longer than the skirt and it is 'showing' / 'exposed' to the public. This is not so nice. Girls of that time had to be more 'conservative'. “  

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080614061623AAburJ8