Many a student slogging through Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has come across this passage, sure to be misapprehended by the modern reader:
“What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance?”
Old hunks? How old? Like Harrison Ford old, or only Idris Elba old?
The Saga of Crooked Donald 