The term literally means a man of old age, and it is used in that sense in Qur’anic Arabic. Later it came to be a title meaning leader, elder, or noble, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, where shaikh became a traditional title of a Bedouin tribal leader in recent centuries. In the Persian Gulf States the title is used for men of stature, whether they are managers in high posts, wealthy business owners, or local rulers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh

I hope that helps some. To be honest, I thought it was interesting to see what the term started out as and later became.

Yeah, when I’m having sex I always think of my father and his father etc etc. Because anal sex is digging in the past and like wearing kilts or looking up your family crest and that stuff.

I’m a little miffed that the fact that she apparently spent–I’m assuming–four years in post-secondary education to get a degree that she’s NOT using. Essentially, what I’m saying is that a business degree is not required if you’re going to be happy with a secretarial position.

I guess some of us do not have to pay off the severe loan entailed in a 4 year degree. Oh and I do not let my husband spend a red cent paying off my ed loan. I’m a liberated fag like that.

I love these comments by the way.

I think, though, that I read the same way in all genres but if I’m doing literary criticism I read differently, and my emotional response is less important, than if I’m caught up in the story. When I’m reading solely for pleasure, however, if I don’t find something of interest in the characters or plot (or if the characters irritate me or otherwise provoke a negative reaction), I’m not likely to be interested in reading further. I don’t think it’s gender specific: I might read on if I liked a hero, a heroine, a non-human creature, or if I wanted to know more about a quest/adventure. The thing with romance is that unless there’s a suspense subplot, the quest/adventure is pretty much about the characters’ evolving relationship, so if you don’t care about them/don’t want to spend time with them, there’s not so much of interest (at least, not to me, although, as I said, if I went into analytical mode I might get enjoyment out of analysing the novel).

I would hate hated Sugar Beth in high school, but I LOVED her as heroine of ASS. And that book — all of SEP, in fact — lends itself so well to selective passage re-reading, IMO. SEP’s books simultaneously charm me and annoy the ever-living crap out of me, but I could read those passages that charm me a thousand times, I suspect, without ever dimming my enjoyment. And then I get to skip all the frantically annoying stuff, too. Like Winnie’s whining.

I definitely think that ideology shapes our response to EVERYTHING we read, but perhaps there are 1) different modes of reading and 2) different expectations for different genres. In Romance, for example, there seems to be this tension between readers who claim they need to personally relate to the heroine and readers who claim they don’t need that connection. In a way, I think Romance invites the reader to connect personally to the heroine in a different way than, say, SF, F, lit fic, or mystery. And I do think readers read differently, with some finding their suspension of disbelief in the relatability of the characters. I haven’t worked all this out mentally, and right now I’m in the midst of a nasty bronchial virus, so there’s very little synaptic activity going on at all, but I’ve noticed this issue in Romance for a long time, that is, the question of whether a reader needs to relate personally to the heroine to like the book. And like I said, I think that the nature of the genre sort of encourages or invites that sense of identification to greater or lesser degree, because so much of the pleasure in the genre revolves around what each of us finds romantic (i.e. to what degree a book seduces the reader).