Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Chapter 1, Paragraph 6

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.

TIM-ELVIS' OBSERVATIONS ON PARAGRAPH 6

Okay, I'll cut to the chase. This paragraph is essentially about Quesadilla renaming his horse. I'm not sure it deserved a whole paragraph. I think Cervantes could have got away with on sentence stating, "He renamed his horse to match his new role as the steed of a knight errant." But, I'm pretty sure Cervantes was attending a creative writing class and his helpful classmates probably suggested he needed more words. Trust me, he didn't. Oh well. Let's dissect this frog and see what made it croak.

Sentence 1: Quesadilla checked out his horse (and this is not a metaphor for inspecting his package or any other part of the main character's male anatomy). In reality, the horse wasn't in great shape. Cervantes uses three unflattering descriptions of the poor thing. First that it had "more quartos than a real" which essentially suggested that the horse had lots of wrinkles (quartos means quarter folds and a real was a Spanish coin). Second that it had more flaws than the "steed of Gonela," a lengendary jester's horse that was subject of much ridicule. Finally a latin insult: "tantum pellis et ossa fuit" which means so much skin and bones. Despite this, in Quesadilla's eyes the horse was a magnificent as Alexander the Great's horse Bucephalus or El Cid's horse Babieca (trust me, these were pretty great horses).

Sentence 2: Quesadilla sat around for four days trying to think of a new name for the horse. He reasoned that if he was going to transform himself into a knight, the horse needed a name that transformed it into a knight's steed.

Sentence 3 and the last sentence in Paragraph 6: So after writing down and rejecting lots of different names, Quesadilla decided to call the horse Rocinant because it sounded snooty enough for a knight's horse.

Okay, tomorrow we stop horsing around. Paragraph 7 is all about Quesadilla coming up with a new name for himself.