英语词汇easy as rolling off a log的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

easy as rolling off a log; logrolling. No one seems to know the origin of the first expression, which dates back to Colonial times. One ingenious theory suggests that colonists searching for home sites in the wilderness would leave their toddlers seated on dry logs temporarily while they explored the area and that the round-bottomed children often rolled off the logs, not knowing how to keep their balance. The metaphor could just as likely have derived from colonists rolling logs off toward a building site, across a meadow or down a hill. Logs can be quite heavy, though, and difficult to move, which ex- plains the origins of logrolling. When an early settler in the West was building a log cabin, his neighbors helped him roll the heavy logs to the home site, or helped him clear the land of felled trees, with the understanding that he would do the same for them if need be. Eventually the frontier expression logrolling came to describe this mutual “backscratching,” passing into politics by 1838 as the practice of one lawmaker voting for a bill sponsored by another if his colleague recipro- cates and votes for a bill sponsored by him—the political deal, “help me roll this one, I’ll help you roll that one past the opposition.”

词汇	easy as rolling off a log
词源	easy as rolling off a log; logrolling. No one seems to know the origin of the first expression, which dates back to Colonial times. One ingenious theory suggests that colonists searching for home sites in the wilderness would leave their toddlers seated on dry logs temporarily while they explored the area and that the round-bottomed children often rolled off the logs, not knowing how to keep their balance. The metaphor could just as likely have derived from colonists rolling logs off toward a building site, across a meadow or down a hill. Logs can be quite heavy, though, and difficult to move, which ex- plains the origins of logrolling. When an early settler in the West was building a log cabin, his neighbors helped him roll the heavy logs to the home site, or helped him clear the land of felled trees, with the understanding that he would do the same for them if need be. Eventually the frontier expression logrolling came to describe this mutual “backscratching,” passing into politics by 1838 as the practice of one lawmaker voting for a bill sponsored by another if his colleague recipro- cates and votes for a bill sponsored by him—the political deal, “help me roll this one, I’ll help you roll that one past the opposition.”
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