| 词源 |
women and children first. For more than a century this say- ing has been part of the unwritten law of the sea—women and children shall be saved before anyone else in the event of a disaster—and in the vast majority of cases, the words have been gallantly honored. The saying seems to have arisen, anony- mously, after H.M.S. Birkenhead went down off the Cape of Good Hope in 1852 and 491 men were lost while all the women and children aboard were saved, and a great tradition was born. |