quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- aha[aha 词源字典]
- exclamation of surprise or delighted discovery, late 14c., from ah + ha.
They crieden out! ... A ha the fox! and after him thay ran. [Chaucer]
[aha etymology, aha origin, 英语词源] - delight (v.)
- c. 1200, deliten, from Old French delitier (see delight (n.)). Related: Delighted; delighting.
- enchanted (adj.)
- "delighted," 1590s, past participle adjective from enchant (v.).
- Ionian (adj.)
- "of Ionia," the districts of ancient Greece inhabited by the Ionians (including Attica and the north coast of the Peloponnesus, but especially the coastal strip of Asia Minor, including the islands of Samos and Chios). The name (which Herodotus credits to an ancestral Ion, son of Apollo and Creusa) probably is pre-Greek, perhaps related to Sanskrit yoni "womb, vulva," and a reference to goddess-worshipping people.
Also used of the sea that lies between Italy and the northern Peloponnesus (1630s). The musical Ionian mode (1844) corresponds to our basic major scale but was characterized by the Greeks as soft and effeminate, as were the Ionians generally.
The Ionians delighted in wanton dances and songs more than the rest of the Greeks ... and wanton gestures were proverbially termed Ionic motions. [Thomas Robinson, "Archæologica Græca," 1807]
- Micawber (n.)
- as a type of a childishly impractical man living in optimistic fantasy, from the character of Wilkins Micawber in Dickens' "David Copperfield" (1850).
"I am at present, my dear Copperfield, engaged in the sale of corn upon commission. It is not an avocation of a remunerative description -- in other words it does not pay -- and some temporary embarrassments of a pecuniary nature have been the consequence. I am however delighted to add that I have now an immediate prospect of something turning up ...."
- saint (n.)
- early 12c., from Old French saint, seinte "a saint; a holy relic," displacing or altering Old English sanct, both from Latin sanctus "holy, consecrated" (used as a noun in Late Latin; also source of Spanish santo, santa, Italian san, etc.), properly past participle of sancire "consecrate" (see sacred). Adopted into most Germanic languages (Old Frisian sankt, Dutch sint, German Sanct).
Originally an adjective prefixed to the name of a canonized person; by c. 1300 it came to be regarded as a noun. Meaning "person of extraordinary holiness" is recorded from 1560s.
Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited. The Duchess of Orleans relates that the irreverent old calumniator, Marshal Villeroi, who in his youth had known St. Francis de Sales, said, on hearing him called saint: 'I am delighted to hear that Monsieur de Sales is a saint. He was fond of saying indelicate things, and used to cheat at cards. In other respects he was a perfect gentleman, though a fool.' [Ambrose Bierce, "Devil's Dictionary," 1911]
Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they--even they--are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. [C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain," 1940]
Saint Bernard, the breed of mastiff dogs (1839), so called because the monks of the hospice of the pass of St. Bernard (between Italy and Switzerland) sent them to rescue snowbound travelers; St. Elmo's Fire "corposant" (1560s) is from Italian fuoco di Sant'Elmo, named for the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors, a corruption of the name of St. Erasmus, an Italian bishop martyred in 303.