quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- dapper[dapper 词源字典]
- dapper: [15] Modern English dapper connotes neatness, alertness, and liveliness, but its etymological significance as revealed by distant relatives such as Old High German tapfar ‘heavy’, Old Prussian debīkan ‘large’, and Old Slavic debelu ‘thick’, is ‘heavy’. The notion of ‘weightiness’ spread to ‘firmness, endurance in battle’, and hence ‘courage’ (German tapfer and Dutch dapper both mean ‘brave’). English acquired the word, with an apparently ironical change of meaning, from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German dapper ‘heavy, stout, bold’.
[dapper etymology, dapper origin, 英语词源] - terse
- terse: [17] Terse originally meant ‘polished, smooth’ (‘This man … so laboured upon it that he left it smooth and terse’, Helkiah Crooke, Description of the Body of Man 1615). By the 18th century, however, the associated notion of ‘neatness’ had led on to ‘neatly concise’. The word’s present-day negative connotations of ‘brusqueness’ seem to be a comparatively recent development. It was borrowed from tersus, the past participle of Latin tergēre ‘wipe’ (source also of English detergent).
=> detergent - neat (adj.)
- 1540s, "clean, free from dirt," from Anglo-French neit, Middle French net "clear, pure" (12c.), from Latin nitidus "well-favored, elegant, trim," literally "gleaming," from nitere "to shine," from PIE root *nei- "to shine" (cognates: Middle Irish niam "gleam, splendor," niamda "shining;" Old Irish noib "holy," niab "strength;" Welsh nwyfiant "gleam, splendor").
Meaning "inclined to be tidy" is from 1570s. Of liquor, "straight," c. 1800, from meaning "unadulterated" (of wine), which is first attested 1570s. Informal sense of "very good" first recorded 1934 in American English; variant neato is teenager slang, first recorded 1968. Related: Neatly; neatness. - shipshape (adj.)
- also ship-shape, "properly arranged," 1640s, originally "according to the fashion of a (sailing) ship," where neatness is a priority and the rigging must be serviceable and stowed properly; from ship (n.) + shape (n.).