8天攻克英语六级8000词汇(六)
2009-10-15来源:和谐英语
ORIENT: towards the sunrise
We speak of Japan as “the land of the rising sun,”and we correctly call all of the far eastern countries the Orient,for the word Orient comes from th Latin term oriens,orientis,which means “rising.”To the Europe of the early days ,the Orient was where the sun rose.The East signified luck to the ancient soothsayers;the sunrise represented life and the beginning of things .These old time prophets judged the future by the flight of birds.If the sacred birds flew east when the priests released them from their cages,it meant good fortune.This superstition was taken over by the Christians ,and it was the traditional plan of the architecture of the early churches to place the chief altar at the eastern end of the edifice .In these ancient Roman augurs,however,if the sacred birds happened to fly west it presaged disaster,for the early fathers associated the setting sun with death and destruction.In the Latin language the verb occido meant “set ,”as the sun,but it also meant “die.”Of course, it was Latin occidens,occidentis,”falling,” “setting,” that gave to the Europeans and to us the name Occidentals in contradistinction to the Orientals, for we live in the land of the setting sun.
PLUMB: began with lead
When you try to plumb the depths of a philosopher, you are, in a poetic sense, letting down a piece of lead on a line in an attempt to fathom his meaning. This verb plumb, of course, comes from the Latin word plumbum which means “lead”, and a plummet is a lead on the end of the line Since a weighted string hangs straight, the term plumb itself took on the meaning of “straight”, as, “He is going plumb to Hell.” Therefore, anything “out of plumb” is off the perpendicular. Also when you plumment down, you are going down in the most direct fashion possible. With all of this, there is no mystery about where the name plumber come from. This is the handyman who fixed your bathroom pipes when they were only made of plumbum, or “lead”.
SHAPE: it came through many spellings
This simple word has appeared in many forms, the Old Norse skap, Old English gesceap, Middle English schap, and a host of other spellings in between up to just plain shape as we use it. All of these words have the idea of creation in them, of “shaping” with the hands. And from shape, in the form of ship, we have such words as friendship, penmanship,horsemanship. And worship, which simply means “worthy shape”.
TAPER: grow thinner
Tapering fingers are like a taper candle which is shaped so that it diminishes in diameter at one end. In similar fashion if we taper off in eating or drinking, our consumption gradually grows less and less like the narrowing cylinder of a candle. The word taper itself seems to come by many intermediate shifts in spelling from the Latin word papyrus which meant taper or wick, for the wicks in those days were made from the pith of the papyrus plant a plant native to Egypt.
TIDE AND TIME: first meant the same thing
There is the old familiar phrase: “Time and tide wait for no man”. The history of tidy will be easier to trace if we first take a glance at tide and time. Originally these two words had almost identical meanings. We still preserve the first sense of tide in such an expression as Christmastide, which really means Christmas time, and it wasn’t until the 14th century that tide applied to the ebb and flow of the ocean, which is , of course, connected with time. Once upon a time our word tidy meant timely, too. They would speak of a tidie happening, meaning “opportune” or timely. Finally tidy came to mean “neat”, “clean”, and “in good order”.
TRAVEL: was once suffering
If you don’t like to travel, you have a historical reason for your feeling. Travel, in the old days, could be bitterly uncomfortable and highly dangerous what with bandits, beasts, and barbarians, and the memories of its perils are still held in many terms. The word travel itself, for example, is from precisely the same source as travail which means extreme agony. They are both derived from the French term travailler which means “to work hard” and this word has as its remote ancestor, the Late Latin trepalium which was a device for torturing. When we say farewell, we are actually saying “travel well”. And even our word peril comes from the Latin periculum which meant “the danger of going forth to travel”.
ZENITH: over your head
We call the zenith that point in the sky directly overhead. The word zenith derives from the term samt in the Arabic phrase samt arras, “way over the head”, which is just what we mean by the word a millennium or two later. It would seem impossible that the spelling samt would ever end up as zenith, but here’s the story that will show how these spellings can wander around. The word samt had a variant form semt, and then in Medieval Latin days some fellow must have mistaken the form and he miscopied it as cenit. This version popped into the French of that day as cenith, and into English as senyth. The stretch from senyth to zenith is easy for an imagination to cover. This may help us to understand the wide variation in form that often exists between the original word and its modern version. The point in the celestial sphere right under your two feet is called the nadir, and this comes directly from the Arabic nazir, “opposite”, for in this case its spelling wasn’t monkeyed with much.
Probably the most important units of time that govern our lives are the months of the year and the days of the week. Here are their stories.
Months of the Year
JANUARY
When the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve and December
Passes into January, we say farewell to the year just gone and we hail the New Year ahead. It is fitting that first month should be called January, for the Roman god Janus who gave this month its name was always represented with two faces, one that gazed at the past and one that looked to the future. However, before the name January was adopted in English, this month was called Wulf-Monath, or “wolf-month”, because at this time of the year the bitter cold brought wolves into the villages to forage for food.
FEBRUARY
The middle of the month of February was marked in ancient Rome for a religious ceremony in which women were beaten for barrenness. This was called the festival of Lupercalia and was held in a cave by the river Tiber. Two youths were selected to play the leading role in the celebration. After the goats were sacrificed, thongs were cut from their hides and given to the youths.these thongs were called februa, or “instruments of purification”, and should they strike a women, she would no longer be barren. The two young men in question would run around the city with the sacred thongs and give smart and “curative” slaps to any barren girls they saw. No one knows just how they knew whom to hit although the barrenness of a women would probably be common knowledge in any village. However this may be, the magic power of the thongs came from Juno, whose epithet as the goddess of fertility was Februaria, and from this word we took the name of our month. February had 29 days, but the Roman Senate took one away and gave it to August, so that August would not be inferior to July. It’s a long step down from all this romance to the original native name for February. The factual English simply called it SProte-kalemonath because the cabbages were sprouting.
We speak of Japan as “the land of the rising sun,”and we correctly call all of the far eastern countries the Orient,for the word Orient comes from th Latin term oriens,orientis,which means “rising.”To the Europe of the early days ,the Orient was where the sun rose.The East signified luck to the ancient soothsayers;the sunrise represented life and the beginning of things .These old time prophets judged the future by the flight of birds.If the sacred birds flew east when the priests released them from their cages,it meant good fortune.This superstition was taken over by the Christians ,and it was the traditional plan of the architecture of the early churches to place the chief altar at the eastern end of the edifice .In these ancient Roman augurs,however,if the sacred birds happened to fly west it presaged disaster,for the early fathers associated the setting sun with death and destruction.In the Latin language the verb occido meant “set ,”as the sun,but it also meant “die.”Of course, it was Latin occidens,occidentis,”falling,” “setting,” that gave to the Europeans and to us the name Occidentals in contradistinction to the Orientals, for we live in the land of the setting sun.
PLUMB: began with lead
When you try to plumb the depths of a philosopher, you are, in a poetic sense, letting down a piece of lead on a line in an attempt to fathom his meaning. This verb plumb, of course, comes from the Latin word plumbum which means “lead”, and a plummet is a lead on the end of the line Since a weighted string hangs straight, the term plumb itself took on the meaning of “straight”, as, “He is going plumb to Hell.” Therefore, anything “out of plumb” is off the perpendicular. Also when you plumment down, you are going down in the most direct fashion possible. With all of this, there is no mystery about where the name plumber come from. This is the handyman who fixed your bathroom pipes when they were only made of plumbum, or “lead”.
SHAPE: it came through many spellings
This simple word has appeared in many forms, the Old Norse skap, Old English gesceap, Middle English schap, and a host of other spellings in between up to just plain shape as we use it. All of these words have the idea of creation in them, of “shaping” with the hands. And from shape, in the form of ship, we have such words as friendship, penmanship,horsemanship. And worship, which simply means “worthy shape”.
TAPER: grow thinner
Tapering fingers are like a taper candle which is shaped so that it diminishes in diameter at one end. In similar fashion if we taper off in eating or drinking, our consumption gradually grows less and less like the narrowing cylinder of a candle. The word taper itself seems to come by many intermediate shifts in spelling from the Latin word papyrus which meant taper or wick, for the wicks in those days were made from the pith of the papyrus plant a plant native to Egypt.
TIDE AND TIME: first meant the same thing
There is the old familiar phrase: “Time and tide wait for no man”. The history of tidy will be easier to trace if we first take a glance at tide and time. Originally these two words had almost identical meanings. We still preserve the first sense of tide in such an expression as Christmastide, which really means Christmas time, and it wasn’t until the 14th century that tide applied to the ebb and flow of the ocean, which is , of course, connected with time. Once upon a time our word tidy meant timely, too. They would speak of a tidie happening, meaning “opportune” or timely. Finally tidy came to mean “neat”, “clean”, and “in good order”.
TRAVEL: was once suffering
If you don’t like to travel, you have a historical reason for your feeling. Travel, in the old days, could be bitterly uncomfortable and highly dangerous what with bandits, beasts, and barbarians, and the memories of its perils are still held in many terms. The word travel itself, for example, is from precisely the same source as travail which means extreme agony. They are both derived from the French term travailler which means “to work hard” and this word has as its remote ancestor, the Late Latin trepalium which was a device for torturing. When we say farewell, we are actually saying “travel well”. And even our word peril comes from the Latin periculum which meant “the danger of going forth to travel”.
ZENITH: over your head
We call the zenith that point in the sky directly overhead. The word zenith derives from the term samt in the Arabic phrase samt arras, “way over the head”, which is just what we mean by the word a millennium or two later. It would seem impossible that the spelling samt would ever end up as zenith, but here’s the story that will show how these spellings can wander around. The word samt had a variant form semt, and then in Medieval Latin days some fellow must have mistaken the form and he miscopied it as cenit. This version popped into the French of that day as cenith, and into English as senyth. The stretch from senyth to zenith is easy for an imagination to cover. This may help us to understand the wide variation in form that often exists between the original word and its modern version. The point in the celestial sphere right under your two feet is called the nadir, and this comes directly from the Arabic nazir, “opposite”, for in this case its spelling wasn’t monkeyed with much.
Probably the most important units of time that govern our lives are the months of the year and the days of the week. Here are their stories.
Months of the Year
JANUARY
When the clock strikes twelve on New Year’s Eve and December
Passes into January, we say farewell to the year just gone and we hail the New Year ahead. It is fitting that first month should be called January, for the Roman god Janus who gave this month its name was always represented with two faces, one that gazed at the past and one that looked to the future. However, before the name January was adopted in English, this month was called Wulf-Monath, or “wolf-month”, because at this time of the year the bitter cold brought wolves into the villages to forage for food.
FEBRUARY
The middle of the month of February was marked in ancient Rome for a religious ceremony in which women were beaten for barrenness. This was called the festival of Lupercalia and was held in a cave by the river Tiber. Two youths were selected to play the leading role in the celebration. After the goats were sacrificed, thongs were cut from their hides and given to the youths.these thongs were called februa, or “instruments of purification”, and should they strike a women, she would no longer be barren. The two young men in question would run around the city with the sacred thongs and give smart and “curative” slaps to any barren girls they saw. No one knows just how they knew whom to hit although the barrenness of a women would probably be common knowledge in any village. However this may be, the magic power of the thongs came from Juno, whose epithet as the goddess of fertility was Februaria, and from this word we took the name of our month. February had 29 days, but the Roman Senate took one away and gave it to August, so that August would not be inferior to July. It’s a long step down from all this romance to the original native name for February. The factual English simply called it SProte-kalemonath because the cabbages were sprouting.
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