Lolita lurking in a 1940s Abbot[t?] & Costello sketch, caught on a WW2 movie-rerun TV last night (with those turncoat boogie-woogie Andrew Sisters switching from 8 to a solid 4 in a bar).
C is bemoaning the fact that he is 40 years old but his “girl friend” is only 10 (Nymphet is not in use then?) Abbot tells C not to worry about the age difference:
You’re now 4 times her age (L Carroll might say “Frice!”) , but in 5 years time the ratio will be reduced to 3 (45/15). And in 20 years’ time, incroyable, C is only twice as old (60/30). Abbot then consoles C that if he waits long enough, he’ll be the same age as his beloved. C says “How dumb! She won’t wait for me that long!”
(VN would certainly be aware of this well-known age "paradox," [Limit (X+n)/X -> 1 as n -> infinity] and I'm exploring to see if he ever refers to it in any way. In his final LoL lecture, he fails to distinguish dull, "commonsense" arithmetic from the fantastic, counter-intuitive explorations of real mathematics. Sad, but not entirely his fault! See Speak, Memory for the childhood sicknesses that curtated an early budding mathematical potential.)
What do we know of VN's movie and TV-watching habits? The C&A film with its breezy WW2 patriotism would have appealed, I'm sure.
Of course, any close analogy of C&A's slapstick with VN's novel now disappears. The concept of "waiting" (HH for Lo, or vice versa) "don't enter into it."
CTaH
Alexey suggests that the above Cyrillic transliteration is not how Russians usually write "Stan." But I say that the CT[reversed epsilon]H he reports reflects the despised Southern English or even the boering Southern African pronunciation (Thet Sten hes e bleck het). Further, of course, I don't have the full Cyrillic-font glory on this keyboard (without some messing about).