英语词汇like a house on fire的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

like a house on fire. Although log cabins weren’t the homes of the earliest American settlers—Swedes settling in Delaware introduced them in 1638—they became a common sight on the western frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries. As practical as they were, these rude wooden structures were tinderboxes once they caught fire. So fast did they burn to the ground that pio- neers began to compare the speed of a fast horse to a log cabin burning to the ground, saying he could go like a house on fire. By 1809 Washington Irving, under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, had given the expression wide currency in his History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, the first great book of comic literature by an American. The phrase soon came to mean “very quickly or energetically.”

词汇	like a house on fire
词源	like a house on fire. Although log cabins weren’t the homes of the earliest American settlers—Swedes settling in Delaware introduced them in 1638—they became a common sight on the western frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries. As practical as they were, these rude wooden structures were tinderboxes once they caught fire. So fast did they burn to the ground that pio- neers began to compare the speed of a fast horse to a log cabin burning to the ground, saying he could go like a house on fire. By 1809 Washington Irving, under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, had given the expression wide currency in his History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, the first great book of comic literature by an American. The phrase soon came to mean “very quickly or energetically.”
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