| 词源 |
skin alive. I’ll skin you alive, someone might say to another person in anger, meaning he will severely beat that person. The expression seems to have been recorded first in 1869, in a refer- ence to a shady “skin-em-alive place.” But it must be much older and is probably based upon the actual practice of skinning ani- mals alive. According to Edward Hoagland in The Tugman’s Passage (1982) “the more brutal [American] pioneers” skinned wolves alive “and turned them loose to scare the rest of the pack.” |