| 词汇 | dash |
| 词源 | dash; dash it! The dash (—) has probably been used as a eu- phemism to suggest words not in favor at least since the inven- tion of the printing press. In fact, the euphemistic curse dash it! is a euphemism based on d—m, a printed form of damn. Some- times the dash is used by itself, but it most often is accompanied by a letter or two. D. H. Lawrence, in principle as opposed to the euphemistic use of the dash as any person, used it this way in his satirical poem “My Naughty Book” (1930), which begins: They say I wrote a naughty book With perfectly awful things in it, putting in all the impossible words like b—and f—and sh—. The book he refers to is Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), not a dash in it. The dash that ends Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) has the distinction of being the first (and per- haps only) dash to end a novel and the only dash that is listed in a dictionary (Farmer and Henley’s Slang and Its Analogues, 1890). The novel ends: “. . . so that, when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille-de-chambre’s———.” |
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