| 词汇 | weed |
| 词源 | weed. “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Fortune of the Republic (1878). But James Russell Lowell seems to have ex- pressed the same sentiment 30 years earlier in A Fable for Crit- ics (1848): “A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.” Later, Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her poem “The Weed” (1872): “A weed is but an unloved flower.” In any case, these sentiments are the ancestors of our current expression a weed is just an un- cultivated plant. Poet Mildred Howells spoke less admiringly of weeds in her poem “The Difficult Seed” (1910): And so it criticized each flower This supercilious seed Until it woke one summer hour, And found itself a weed. While a weed is really only an uncultivated plant, weeds are generally regarded as unwanted pervasive plants to be rooted out from gardens. The word weed, recorded in one form or an- other since the ninth century, comes from the Old English wiod, a variant of an early Saxon term for “wild.” Nevertheless, plants regarded as weeds change from century to century. The tomato was considered a pernicious weed in cornfields until the Mayans began cultivating it. Similarly, rye and oats were once known as weeds in wheat fields. Today, experts regard the world’s worst land weeds as purple nutsedge, Bermuda grass, Cogan grass, and lantana. Some weeds aren’t plants but simply clothing of any kind, deriving from the Anglo-Saxon word waede, “garment.” Widow’s weeds are mourning garments, the black often worn by widows. The expression contributes the only use of the word weeds for clothing remaining in English, but weeds was used by Spenser, Shakespeare, and many other writers to mean everyday clothing for both men and women. |
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