单词 | 俗语 |
释义 | 〔Hoosier〕As the fame of Indiana basketball grows ever greater,perhaps a larger number of people have become curious about the origins of the wordHoosier, the nickname for a native or resident of Indiana. As more than one of the curious has discovered,the origins are rather opaque.The most likely possibility is thatHoosier is an alteration of hoozer, an English dialect word recorded in Cumberland,a former county of northwest England, in the late 19th century and used to refer to anything unusually large.The transition betweenhoozer and Hoosier is not clear. The first recorded instance ofHoosier meaning "Indiana resident" is dated 1826; however, it seems possible that senses of the word recorded later in theDictionary of Americanisms, including "a big, burly, uncouth specimen or individual; a frontiersman, countryman, rustic,”reflect the kind of use this word had before it settled down in Indiana.随着印第安纳州篮球的名声越来越响,也许很多人对Hoosier, 印第安纳州人或定居者的别称这个词的来源感到好奇。 正如若干好奇者所发现的那样,其来源非常隐晦。最大的可能性是Hoosier 是 hoozer 的变体, 这是记录于坎伯兰的英格兰方言,19世纪后期英格兰西北部以前的一个郡,用来指特别巨大的东西。Hoozer 和 Hoosier 之间的过渡并不清楚。 意思是“印第安那州居住者”的Hoosier 的首次记载是在1826年; 但是可能该词的解释后来收录于美国俗语词典 中, 包括“一个庞大的、粗壮的、野蛮的种类或个体;拓荒者,乡巴佬,庄稼人,”可能反映了它在落户印第安那之前所有的用法〔rural〕"some rustic phrases which I had learned at the farmer's house" (Jonathan Swift). “我在那个农民家里学会的一些乡间俗语” (约纳森·斯威夫特)。 〔vulgarism〕A word, phrase, or manner of expression used chiefly by uneducated people.俗语:主要是没受过教育的人用的词汇、短语或表达方式〔hooker〕In hisPersonal Memoirs Ulysses S. Grant described Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker as "a dangerous man . . . not subordinate to his superiors.” Hooker had his faults, of course.He may indeed have been insubordinate;undoubtedly he was an erratic leader.But there is one thing of which he is often accused that "Fighting Joe" Hooker certainly did not do:he did not give his name to prostitutes.According to a popular story,the men under Hooker's command during the Civil War were a particularly wild bunch.When his troops were on leave,we are told, they spent much of their time in brothels.For this reason, as the story goes,prostitutes came to be known ashookers. It is not difficult to understand how such a theory might have originated.The major general's name differs from the wordhooker only in the capital letter that begins it. And it is true that Hooker's men were at times ill-disciplined (although it seems that liquor, not women, was the main source of their difficulties with the provost marshal).However attractive this theory may be,it cannot be true.The wordhooker, with the sense "prostitute,” is in fact older than the Civil War. It appeared in the second edition (although not in the first) of John Russell Bartlett'sDictionary of Americanisms, published in 1859.Bartlett definedhooker as "a strumpet, a sailor's trull.” He also said that the word was derived from Corlear's Hook,a district in New York City,but this was only a guess.There is no evidence that the term originated in New York.Norman Ellsworth Eliason has traced this use ofhooker back to 1845 in North Carolina. He reported the usage inTarheel Talk; an Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860, published in 1956. The fact that we have no earlier written evidence does not mean thathooker was never used to mean "prostitute" before 1845. The history ofhooker is, quite simply, murky; we do not know when or where it was first used,but we can be very certain that it did not begin with Joseph Hooker.Also, we have no firm evidence that it came from Corlear's Hook.Scholarly evidence or lack thereof notwithstanding,the late Bruce Catton, the Civil War historian, did not go so far as to exonerate completely the Union general.Although "the term ‘hooker’ did not originate during the Civil War,”wrote Catton, "it certainly became popular then.During these war years, Washington developed a large [red-light district] somewhere south of Constitution Avenue.This became known as Hooker's Division in tribute to the proclivities of General Joseph Hookerand the name has stuck ever since.”If the termhooker was derived neither from Joseph Hooker nor from Corlear's Hook, what is its derivation?It is most likely that thishooker is, etymologically, simply "one who hooks.” The term portrays a prostitute as a person who hooks, or snares, clients.尤利西斯·S·格兰特在他的个人回忆录 中把陆军少将约瑟夫·胡克描写成“一个危险人物…从不服从于他的顶头上司”。 胡克当然有他的缺点。他也许曾是一个难以屈服的人;但他无疑是一个怪癖的军官。但是“好战的乔”,胡克却因为一件他肯定没有干过的事情而屡遭指责;他从不对妓女透露他的姓名。根据一个流行故事,内战中胡克的手下有一伙特别狂野的人们。当他的队伍即将离开时,据说他们总在妓院里消磨时日。故事还说正因为如此,妓女开始被叫做hookers。 我们不难理解这样一个故事的起源的推测。这个将军的名字和hooker 只差开头的一个大写字母。 而且胡克的手下在当时确实纪律涣散(尽管看来是酒而非女人才导致了他们与宪兵司令之间的矛盾)。不管这个故事多么诱人,它不可能是真实的。事实上hooker 一词作为“妓女”的意思比内战的历史还要早。 它出现于约翰·罗素·巴特利特编纂的美国俗语词典 的第二版(尽管第一版中没有), 出版于1859年。巴特利特把hooker 定义为“一个妓女,水手的妓女”。 他还说这个词来源于科利尔的胡克,纽约市的一个地区,但这只是一个猜想。没有证据证明这一说法源于纽约。诺曼·爱尔斯华斯·艾利森把hooker 的用法追溯到1845年的北卡罗来纳州。 他在1956年出版的北卡罗来纳州闲话; 1860年前北卡罗来纳英语历史研究 中说明了这一用法。 缺乏早期书面证据这一事实并不意味着在1845年之前hooker 没有被用作“妓女”一义。 很简单,hooker 的历史隐晦难知; 我们不知道它在何时何地被首次使用,但我们可以肯定它并不始于约瑟夫·胡克。而且我们没有确凿证据证明它来源于科利尔的胡克。不管有无学术性的证据,已故的内战历史学家布鲁斯·卡通并没有做到为联邦将军彻底开脱的地步。尽管“‘hooker’这一词语并不是来源于内战,”卡通写道,“在那之后它肯定流行了起来。在战争年代,华盛顿在宪法大街南部某个地方发展了很大的[红灯区]。人们把这里称作胡克的辖区,作为对约瑟夫·胡克将军怪癖的献礼,这个名字从此便生根发芽”。如果hooker 这一词语既不是源于约瑟夫·胡克也不来自于科利尔的胡克, 那么它的词源究竟是什么呢?从词源学上来说hooker 很有可能仅仅是“引…上钩的人”。 这一词语把妓女描绘成一个勾引或引诱客人的人〔literally〕The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning ofliterally itself—if it did, the word would long since have come to mean "virtually" or "figuratively"—but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive meaning "without exaggeration,”as inThey had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended.This looser use of the wordliterally does not usually create problems, but it can lead to an inadvertently comic effect when the word is used together with an idiomatic expression that has its source in a frozen figure of speech,such as inI literally died laughing. 这一用法并不根源于literally 本身意义的演变——如果是这样的话, 这个词早就会有“几乎”或“比喻地”的意思——而是来源于把这个词用作一个一般的加强词表示“毫不夸张”这样一个自然趋势,正如在事实上他们没有获得政府对这一计划的帮助 中, 并没有与句子的喻意形成任何对比。literally 的这一不精确的用法通常并不会产生什么问题, 但当它与一个源于固定修饰的俗语连用时,会偶尔产生喜剧性效果,如我真的笑死了 〔dress〕A dress is such a common article of modern attirethat it is difficult to imagine that the worddress at one time did not refer to such a thing. The earliest sense ofdress, recorded in a work written before 1450, was "speech, talk.” The relationship of our modern sense to this early sense is explained by the factthat the noundress comes from the verb dress, which goes back through Old Frenchdrecier, "to arrange,” and the assumed Vulgar Latindīrectiāre to Latin dīrectus, a form of the verbdīrigere, "to direct.” In accordance with its etymology the verbdress has meant or still means "to place,” "to arrange,” and "to put in order.” The sense "to clothe" is related to the notion of putting in order,specifically in regard to clothing.This verb sense then gave rise to the noun sense "personal attire"as well as to the important garment sense, which has made the fortune of many a fashion designer.The earliest noun sense,"speech,” comes from a verb sense having to do with addressing or directing words to other people.衣服是现代服饰中相当普通的物件,很难想象dress 一词一度并不指衣服。 根据写于1450年以前的一本书记载dress 的最早含义是“说话,谈话。” 我们的现代含义与这一早期含义的关系可由以下事实解释:名词dress 来源于动词 dress , 动词dress又可追溯到古法语drecier, “安排”, 与假定的拉丁俗语directiaer 乃至拉丁语 directus, 该拉丁词是动词dirigere “引导”的一种形式。 按照其词源动词dress 曾经并仍意为“放置”,“安排”与“使有序”。 “着衣”一义与使有序的意思有关,特别是有关衣物时,该动词意义又产生了名词意义“个人服饰”,以及使许多服装设计师大发其财的正式礼服的意义。最早的名词含义,“说话”来自于有关与其它人说话的动词意义〔byword〕An often-used word or phrase.俗语:常用的单词或短语〔vulgar〕Abbr. vulg.Spoken by or expressed in language spoken by the common people; vernacular:缩写 vulg.俗语的,方言的:用普通人的语言说的或表达的;地方话的:〔haywire〕It may seem oddthat the wordhaywire should have come to describe something or someone that is not functioning properly. Haywire originally was in fact simply a compound of the words hay and wire, denoting wire used to bale things such as hay or straw.The term is first recorded as a noun in a debate that occurred in the Canadian House of Commons (1917);hence it is a Canadianism, or since it soon thereafter appeared in a United States publication, a North Americanism.We find an earlier (1905) attributive use,however, in the phrasehay wire outfit, a term used contemptuously for poorly equipped loggers. What lies behind this term is the practice of making repairs with haywire.Haywire is found in other contexts with the general sense "makeshift, inefficient,” from which comes the extended senses "not functioning properly" and "crazy.”看起来或许很奇怪,haywire 一词竟可以用来形容某物或某人不能正常运转。 事实上,haywire 是由 hay 和 wire 两个词组成的一个简单复合词, 指用来捆绑诸如干草或麦秆的铁丝,这个词在1917年加拿大众议院的一次辩论中第一次以一个名词的形式被记录下来,因此这是一个加拿大俗语或者说是北美俗词,因此这词很快就出现在美国出版物中。我们可以找到一个更早的(1905年)形容性用法,词组hay wire outfit, 是对装备不足的伐木工人的鄙称。 这个词的内涵是指准备用铁丝捆干草的工作。在其它语境中,haywire 被用来表示“临时的,效率低的”这种笼统的意思, 由此扩展出“不能正常工作的”以及“疯狂的”这些意义〔scarce〕The phrasescarce excerpt, if it ever should occur to one, is an excellent example of how two intimately related words can diverge from one another in form while passing from one language to another over the centuries.Both words can be traced back to the Latin wordexcerpo (past participle stem excerpt- ), meaning "to pick out,” "to pick out mentally,” and "to select a passage for quotation.”This is clearly the ultimate source of our nounexcerpt (first recorded before 1638) and verb (first recorded around 1536), a past participle usage already being recorded in the 15th century. A more tangled path leads to our wordscarce. It is assumed that side by side with Latinexcerpere existed the Vulgar Latin form .excarpere. .Excarpsus, an adjective formed with the past participle of .excarpere in Vulgar Latin, meant "narrow, cramped,” and from this Vulgar Latin form came the Old French wordéchars, "insufficient, cramped,” and "stingy.” The Old French word, which existed in a variety of forms in Old French,includingscars and the chiefly Old North French form escarse, was borrowed into Middle English asscarse, being first recorded in a manuscript written around 1300.如果人们能够想到scarce excerpt 这个词语, 是一个说明两个关系密切的词语如何历经几个世纪,在一种语言转化到另一种语言的同时从一种形式转化到另一种形式的极佳例子。两个词可追溯到拉丁词excerpo (过去分词词根为 excerpt- ), 意为“选出”、“在思想上进行选择”和“为了引用而选择一个段落”。很清楚,名词excerpt (第一次记录于1638年前)和动词(首次记录于约1536年)及过去分词用法的最终词源,在15世纪时就已经被记录下来。 词语scarce 的变化更为复杂。 据猜测与拉丁文中excerpere 同时存在的有拉丁俗语形式 excarpere。 Excarpsus在拉丁俗语中是由 excarpere 的过去分词形成的,意为“狭窄的、受限制的”, 从这一拉丁俗语形式形成了古法语词echars ,意为“不足的、受限制的”及“吝啬的”。 这些在古法语中以多种形式存在的古法语词,包括scars 和北部古法语的主要形式 escarse , 被引入中世纪英语中成为scarse , 在1300年左右第一次被记载在一手稿本中〔vernacular〕The everyday language spoken by a people as distinguished from the literary language.See Synonyms at dialect 日常用语;俗语;白话:某个民族所说的、区别于书面语言的日常用语 参见 dialect |
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