to positively supine lengths

[Chicken Sandwich]

Gould carried the art of bending over backwards to positively supine lengths in one of his less admired books, Rocks of Ages.

What exactly does supine mean here?

su‧pine / ˈsuːpaɪn, ˈsjuː- $ suːˈpaɪn / adjective formal

1 lying on your back OPP prone : in a supine position

2 allowing other people to make decisions instead of you, in a way that seems very weak : a supine and cowardly press

Only definition 2 makes some seems to apply to the sentence I qouted above. Is this what supine means here?

Thanks.

 

[5jj]

If you bend over backwards to so something, you try extremely hard to do it.

Dawkins is suggesting here that Gould has bent so far over backwards that he has ended up supine, lying on his back, i.e. he has gone to such ridiculous lengths to be reasonable that he has ended up looking foolish.

 

[bhaisahab]

What exactly does supine mean here?



Only definition 2 makes some seems to apply to the sentence I qouted above. Is this what supine means here?

Thanks.

Definition #1 is the one. He bent over backwards so far that he was lying on his back on the floor. (figuratively of course)

 

[BobK]

Definition #1 is the one. He bent over backwards so far that he was lying on his back on the floor. (figuratively of course)

::up: It's the one, but it's woefully wrong. I wonder where it comes from :-? - supine is the exact opposite of prone. I'm not surprised that CS found Dawkins hard to understand, if a dictionary is so inaccurate!

b

PS My mistake - hasty misreading

 

[5jj]

::up: It's the one, but it's woefully wrong. I wonder where it comes from :-? - supine is the exact opposite of prone. I'm not surprised that CS found Dawkins hard to understand, if a dictionary is so inaccurate!

It seems to me that the dictionary was correct -"lying on your back OPP prone : in a supine position ," if we take it that OPP prone means - "the opposite of supine' is prone"

 

[BobK]

In my defence, I think it was unnecessarily and unhelpfully gnomic:

1 lying on your back OPP prone : in a supine position

The reader is expected to read the bolded part as not part of the example, or else to read it as a very cryptic abbreviation: lying on your back [in a position of which the opposite is] prone[[STRIKE]:[/STRIKE][is the same as lying] in a supine position.

Harmless drudge