英语词汇lawn的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

lawn. Americans alone spent some 8.4 billion on their lawns in 1995. The lawns we maniacally manicure today take their name from the obsolete word laund, which is a borrowing from Old French lande, “moor,” and was first recorded in the early 14th cen- tury. Laund meant merely “a woodland glade” and its first defini- tion in 1548 described a “place void of trees.” Lawn is simply a vari- ant spelling of that word, but it isn’t until the early 18th century that we find lawn used to mean a plot of grass kept closely mowed, usually by gardeners with scythes or by grazing animals. However, Chinese emperors had lawns as far back as 157 b.c., and the Maya and Aztec royalty made lawns, as did the ancient Romans, who used sheep to maintain them. Writing in the Smithsonian maga- zine (June 1991), Richard Wolkomir remarks on our passion for lawns despite the backbreaking and mindbending troubles they cause us: “Grassophilia has deep roots. A former Smithsonian ecologist, John H. Falk, once studied people’s terrain preferences. He found that, whether they live in the United States, Africa, or India, the great majority prefer grassy savannas over all other landscapes, even if they’ve never seen a savanna. He had theorized that grasslands were the early human’s preferred habitat and that preference seems to be genetically ingrained in man today.”

词汇	lawn
词源	lawn. Americans alone spent some 8.4 billion on their lawns in 1995. The lawns we maniacally manicure today take their name from the obsolete word laund, which is a borrowing from Old French lande, “moor,” and was first recorded in the early 14th cen- tury. Laund meant merely “a woodland glade” and its first defini- tion in 1548 described a “place void of trees.” Lawn is simply a vari- ant spelling of that word, but it isn’t until the early 18th century that we find lawn used to mean a plot of grass kept closely mowed, usually by gardeners with scythes or by grazing animals. However, Chinese emperors had lawns as far back as 157 b.c., and the Maya and Aztec royalty made lawns, as did the ancient Romans, who used sheep to maintain them. Writing in the Smithsonian maga- zine (June 1991), Richard Wolkomir remarks on our passion for lawns despite the backbreaking and mindbending troubles they cause us: “Grassophilia has deep roots. A former Smithsonian ecologist, John H. Falk, once studied people’s terrain preferences. He found that, whether they live in the United States, Africa, or India, the great majority prefer grassy savannas over all other landscapes, even if they’ve never seen a savanna. He had theorized that grasslands were the early human’s preferred habitat and that preference seems to be genetically ingrained in man today.”
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