英语词汇kilroy was here的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

Kilroy was here. No catchphrase has ever rivaled Kilroy since it appeared on walls and every other available surface during World War II. It was first presumed that Kilroy was fictional; one graffiti expert even insisted that Kilroy represented an Oed- ipal fantasy, combining “kill” with “roi” (the French word for “king”). But word sleuths found that James J. Kilroy, a politi- cian and an inspector in a Quincy, Massachusetts shipyard, coined the slogan. Kilroy chalked the words on ships and crates of equipment to indicate that he had inspected them. From Quincy the phrase traveled on ships and crates all over the world, copied by GIs wherever it went, and Kilroy, who died in Boston in 1962 at the age of 60, became the most widely “pub- lished” man since Shakespeare. James Kilroy wrote this about the coinage in the New York Times Magazine (Jan. 12, 1947): “On December 5, 1941, I started to work for Bethlehem Steel Company, Fore River Ship Yard, Quincy, Mass., as a rate setter (inspector) . . . I was getting sick of being accused of not look- ing the jobs over and one day, as I came through the manhole of a tank I had just surveyed, I angrily marked with yellow crayon on the tank top, where the tester could see it, ‘KILROY WAS HERE.’ ”

词汇	kilroy was here
词源	Kilroy was here. No catchphrase has ever rivaled Kilroy since it appeared on walls and every other available surface during World War II. It was first presumed that Kilroy was fictional; one graffiti expert even insisted that Kilroy represented an Oed- ipal fantasy, combining “kill” with “roi” (the French word for “king”). But word sleuths found that James J. Kilroy, a politi- cian and an inspector in a Quincy, Massachusetts shipyard, coined the slogan. Kilroy chalked the words on ships and crates of equipment to indicate that he had inspected them. From Quincy the phrase traveled on ships and crates all over the world, copied by GIs wherever it went, and Kilroy, who died in Boston in 1962 at the age of 60, became the most widely “pub- lished” man since Shakespeare. James Kilroy wrote this about the coinage in the New York Times Magazine (Jan. 12, 1947): “On December 5, 1941, I started to work for Bethlehem Steel Company, Fore River Ship Yard, Quincy, Mass., as a rate setter (inspector) . . . I was getting sick of being accused of not look- ing the jobs over and one day, as I came through the manhole of a tank I had just surveyed, I angrily marked with yellow crayon on the tank top, where the tester could see it, ‘KILROY WAS HERE.’ ”
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