No one's seen Ed in the past two weeks. There's a pile of rotting newspapers outside his door, his phone's been disconnected, and his kids are living in an orphanage.
Well, the last time I saw him was about two weeks ago, when I set up his computer and showed him Minesweeper, SimCity, and Everything2.
Oh. Small wonder, then.
"Small wonder" is an
English expression meaning, approximately, "that's
expected." It's mildly
ironic, because the speaker is in fact expressing no
wonder at all.
It has fallen out of common use and is mostly seen today in
pallid attempts at
humor when the
media write about something that is interesting and
small (or, in really
egregious cases, about a
short celebrity). Its other major use is in reference to the 1980s
sitcom discussed in this node's other writeups.