| 词汇 | flash in the pan |
| 词源 | flash in the pan. Old flintlock muskets had a pan, or depres- sion, that held the priming powder. The guns fired after the trigger was pulled and sparks produced by the steel hammer striking a flint ignited the powder, which exploded the main charge. That is, the guns sometimes fired. Flintlocks, used since the 17th century, were unreliable weapons and frequently didn’t work. Often the powder just flared or flashed up in the pan, failing to explode the main charge because the charge was wet or because the touchhole linking the two was clogged. Flint- locks “hanging fire” like this were common enough to make the term a flash in the pan a natural figure of speech for “any short- lived brilliance yielding no results in the long run” and, long af- ter the old flintlocks were relegated to museums, it is still used to describe a person who fails to live up to his early promise. |
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