英语词汇skeleton in the closet的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

skeleton in the closet. It took years to find what seemed to be “the perfect lady,” one without “a single care or trouble,” but, alack and alas, the lady proved to have her dark secret, too. She admitted this and took the investigators to her bedroom closet, where a skeleton hung from the ceiling. After explaining that the skeleton was once her husband’s rival, whom he had killed in a duel, she cried: “I try to keep my trouble to myself, but eve- ry night my husband forces me to kiss that skeleton!” Certainly this would be one of the most interesting of phrase derivations if the old horror story could be proved. But it can’t. No one knows the origin of a skeleton in the closet, a shameful secret which a family tries to hide. There have also been attempts to link the words with actual skeletons that doctors hid in their homes or offices when dissection was forbidden by law, none very convincing. We only know that William Makepeace Thackeray first used the expression in print in an 1855 story he contributed to Punch and that it was probably in use at least 10 years before that.

词汇	skeleton in the closet
词源	skeleton in the closet. It took years to find what seemed to be “the perfect lady,” one without “a single care or trouble,” but, alack and alas, the lady proved to have her dark secret, too. She admitted this and took the investigators to her bedroom closet, where a skeleton hung from the ceiling. After explaining that the skeleton was once her husband’s rival, whom he had killed in a duel, she cried: “I try to keep my trouble to myself, but eve- ry night my husband forces me to kiss that skeleton!” Certainly this would be one of the most interesting of phrase derivations if the old horror story could be proved. But it can’t. No one knows the origin of a skeleton in the closet, a shameful secret which a family tries to hide. There have also been attempts to link the words with actual skeletons that doctors hid in their homes or offices when dissection was forbidden by law, none very convincing. We only know that William Makepeace Thackeray first used the expression in print in an 1855 story he contributed to Punch and that it was probably in use at least 10 years before that.
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