词汇 | crap |
词源 | crap; crapper. Poor Thomas Crapper, whose name is about as close as anyone would normally want to get to the fourth most expurgated word in the English language, was an En- glishman who developed and manufactured the modern toilet bowl, which U.S. soldiers in World War I saw and used every- where, bringing the name crapper home with them to America. The story of his life, of “the power behind the throne,” has re- cently been published under the title Flushed with Pride. It is apparently not a put-on, although it has the ring of a classic hoax. Crapper’s name, of course, is only a lucky or unlucky co- incidence. It does not give us the word crap from the Dutch, krappe, “scraps,” which through the ages has been applied to of- fal or excrement. Crap is now most often used metaphorically to mean “nonsense or lying,” as in “That’s a lot of crap.” |
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