| 单词 | catcall |
| 例句 | catcall noun •the young comics have to learn how to withstand the inevitable catcalls:whistle, boo, hiss, jeer, raspberry, taunt | (catcalls) scoffing, abuse, taunting, derision.WORD NOTE raspberry I am frequently tempted, as an Englishman, to try to induce Americans to introduce Cockney rhyming slang on occasion into their writings, if only to enhance their cosmopolitan air. The general form of this slang is familiar, if a little odd: you take a word, find a two- or three-word phrase that rhymes with it, then cut the final words of the phrase away and employ the first only to denote what you first wanted. An example: head rhymes with loaf of bread. Cut away of bread, and you are left with loaf —which term now replaces head in all conversation. A stupid person is thus one who doesn't use his loaf. Similarly: tit-for-tat rhymes with hat; slice away tat, and the conflated nonce-word titfor is thenceforward used to mean hat. •"Take off your titfor," the pastor bellowed at the bowler-wearer in church. The list goes on: the trouble's on the dog derives from the trouble-and-strife, "the wife," is on the dog-and-bone, "the phone"—the wife is on the phone. And while berk, which means "a singularly disagreeable fool," comes from Berkshire Hunt, and is really very rude indeed, the infinitely more congenial raspberry is from raspberry tart, it rhymes with fart, and is used, says the Oxford English Dictionary, to denote the sound of disapproval one makes with one's lips, and which sounds like the rending of glazed calico. Sure it does. I suspect it is less than au courant to know how calico sounds—or even what calico is—when noisily showing how you loathe the umpire, or a boring politician. And to be able to describe the sound you make as a raspberry, and to know just why, is to be au courant and cosmopolitan indeed. — SWConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage. |
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