Learn English – What does “But, hell…” mean

meaning

… but me! They [the other four POWs] were all in the room but Hefner, and he was standing in the door. They put Hefner in solitary in the next room over, and then he had an appendicitis attack that night, and they had to operate on him. So, they put him in the room next to were we was at and had to leave the door open. Everybody was going back and forth the the latrine, and they seen him a laying in there in a hospital bed and figured they [the NVA] had beat the hell outta Danny. But, hell, they didn't see me for a week! They didn’t know what had happened to me.”

—To Hell and Beyond.

But, hell, they didn't see me for a week!

I would imagine it's something to boost your self-confidence up and make you care less about the situation. Is that close? Does it have any other meaning in any other context?

Best Answer

It's an intensifier, mildly obscene, which comes before a statement or clause. It does not necessarily express a negative attitude:

"You wanna know if I'll buy a car from you? Hell, I'll buy three of 'em!"

This is a little old-fashioned, and you don't hear it so much these days, probably because "hell" has on the one hand lost a lot of its shock value as a swear word but on the other hand is still considered mildly obscene and avoided in polite speech (except in reference to the religious conception of hell).

You can insert (some) other swear words instead of "hell" to mean the same thing, but this is to be avoided except in very casual speech among friends, obviously. Non-obscene versions of the same are "heck" (sounds a little childish), "man" (a little 1980s), "dang" (maybe only in the American South).

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Learn English – What does “three deep” mean

I take it to mean that there were three stacks of books (each stack being of indeterminate height), one behind another.

To give some cheap ASCII art of it:

||
wall
|| [[[[       ]]]]    :::::
||  AAAAA   BBBBBB    CCCCCC
|| @@@@@    #####    $$$$$$$$               Harry stands here, 
||  1111   2222222  3333333              <- looking that way
|| abooka  bbbookb   ccbookc
===============================mantel==  
   stack 1 stack2    stack3

In the above "art", the books are stacked five high and three deep (from Harry's perspective). There's probably room for another stack, which would then make the stacks four deep; and you could pile on as many more books as you want (until they fall over), making the stacks 15 high or more.

Learn English – What does “Here it comes” mean

As TheRealLester says:

the it in the sentence is referring to the thing that Riley needs to say

but this is a very flexible phrase (could I even say idiom?)

It is something you can think or say whenever you know something bad or unwanted is expected and has now arrived.

For some more examples:

Your whole family has a nasty cold, and you have just finished a really loud long snotty sneeze. You think, "HERE IT COMES!"

This one means:

"Oh no! That sneeze means I have caught the cold, haven't I?"

The company you work for has been losing money for months, an urgent all-staff meeting has been called. Someone says: "Come on chaps, here it comes."

This means:

"Come on, everyone; this is the meeting where they tell us we are all out of a job."

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Learn English – What does “three deep” mean

Learn English – What does “Here it comes” mean

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