英语词汇run hot and cold的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

run hot and cold. There are many traditional stories about the semilegendary fabulist Aesop. He is said to have lived in the middle of the sixth century b.c. and been the black slave of a Thracian named Iadmon. Supposedly deformed and ugly, he won his freedom by telling fables. At any rate, many tales about animals, adapted to moral or satirical ends, circulated under his name, though some of them really date back a thousand years before his birth. One of Aesop’s fables is about a satyr who finds a winter traveler blowing on his fingers to keep them warm. When the satyr gives the man a bowl of hot pottage and he blows on that, too, the satyr asks him why. “I am trying to cool it,” the man says. The satyr thereupon orders the man out of his cave, declaring “I will have no dealings with one who can blow hot and cold from the same mouth!” Though the traveler wasn’t inconsistent—his breath was first warmer and then colder than the object he blew upon—this fable became the ba- sis for the saying to blow hot and cold, “to be inconsistent or vacillate.” Today the expression is often heard in the form to run hot and cold, reinforced in modern times, perhaps, by plumbing that gives us alternately hot water and cold.

词汇	run hot and cold
词源	run hot and cold. There are many traditional stories about the semilegendary fabulist Aesop. He is said to have lived in the middle of the sixth century b.c. and been the black slave of a Thracian named Iadmon. Supposedly deformed and ugly, he won his freedom by telling fables. At any rate, many tales about animals, adapted to moral or satirical ends, circulated under his name, though some of them really date back a thousand years before his birth. One of Aesop’s fables is about a satyr who finds a winter traveler blowing on his fingers to keep them warm. When the satyr gives the man a bowl of hot pottage and he blows on that, too, the satyr asks him why. “I am trying to cool it,” the man says. The satyr thereupon orders the man out of his cave, declaring “I will have no dealings with one who can blow hot and cold from the same mouth!” Though the traveler wasn’t inconsistent—his breath was first warmer and then colder than the object he blew upon—this fable became the ba- sis for the saying to blow hot and cold, “to be inconsistent or vacillate.” Today the expression is often heard in the form to run hot and cold, reinforced in modern times, perhaps, by plumbing that gives us alternately hot water and cold.
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