| 词源 |
know one’s cans. Cowboys on the range in the 19th century were usually starved for reading matter and often read the la- bels on the cook’s tin cans, learning them by heart. A tenderfoot could always be distinguished because he didn’t know his cans. The expression isn’t recorded in the Dictionary of American- isms but is given in Ray Allen Billington’s America’s Frontier Culture (1977). Wrote Edna Ferber in Cimmaron (1930): “The back and the side doors of the dwelling . . . littered with the empty tin cans that mark any new American settlement, and especially one whose drought is relieved by the thirst-quenching coolness of tinned tomatoes and peaches. Perhaps the canned tomato, as much as anything else, made possible the settling of the vast West and Southwest.” |