if at all = ?

[coolfool_sin]

While I'm reading The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain by Kenneth O. Morgan, a kind of odd phrase runs into me, which is as follows:

1. (page 286, Chapter 6 The stuarts) Towering above the Stuart age were the two decades of civil war, revolution, and republican experiment which out to have changed fundamentally the course of English history, but which did so, if at all, very elusively.

I guess it may have something to do with

2. (page 62, Chapter 2 The Anglo-Saxon Period) Such a system could hardly be stable: when a king grew sick, poor, or mean his retinue would collapse, and his heirs, if they survived at all, would become sub-kings or followers of a new lord.

What's more, I bump into it once more when looking up Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009:

3. Under entry Five Good Emperors: the ancient Roman imperial succession of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, who presided over the most majestic days of the Roman Empire. It was not a bloodline; Nerva was raised to the principate by the assassins of Domitian, and the others were successively adopted heirs, each only distantly related to his predecessor if at all.

I wonder that the authors may deliberately omit some words in order to make their respective articles neat and simple, and whether or not there's someone here who'd give me a hand to restore the completely original sentences.

Thanks a lot.

[mallam]

Thank you again.

Yes I see what purfleistic means now. My eyes are so bad that I coulnt see what it was at all at first, and could only see it as pur-fleistic or something. Now that I do see it I rather think I have seen it before, whereas I was assuming you had invented it. A perfectly OK invention if so, and I am not suggesting that you should have spelt it any differently, but purfle-istic would have helped my failing eyesight.

But now you are insulting my intelligence! Of course I know what 'pixellated' means. I just don't see how it relates to your expression 'pixellated kinesics', which still seems distinctly pixillated to me!

[Clanad]

The word picture I'd hoped to invent, mallam, with the phrase pixellated kinesics was one of hand waving, head tilting, index finger pointing, shoulder shrugging, brow creasing, single brow lifting or any other body language all accomplished at a distance by computer, all in the context of an epistolaric quodlibet. Obviously, having failed in that task and insulted you yet again, I can only fall on my nihontō seeking comfort in Elysian Fields, to mix metaphors...

[mallam]

Yes, i think i see it now. It's not so much the kinesics that are pixellated (altho they are of course pixillated in both our cases thx no doubt to the dreadful affliction of primogeniture we apparently share). but that their medium is the pixels on our screens.

I am not sure falling on them is supposed to be one of the options for nihontō. But don't you be using it for seppuku either! Or worrying about mixed metaphors either: Elysianity presumably transcends cultural coordinates.

[Twenty20]

Be quiet you two, youre impressing no one.