英语词汇namby-pamby的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

namby-pamby. Poor Ambrose Philips (ca. 1675–1749) had the bad luck to accidentally tread on Alexander Pope, easily the most venomous and malicious of the great English poets. Politics and envy had more to do with Philips’s misfortune than insipid versifying, for he was a Whig and Pope a Tory, and in 1713 the Whig Guardian praised the Whig pastoral poet as the only worthy successor of Spenser. This inane criti- cism enraged “the Wasp of Twickenham” and initiated a quar- rel between the two poets that Samuel Johnson described as a “perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.” Pope’s friend, poet, and composer Henry Carey soon joined in the fray. Carey, ru- mored author of the words and music of the British anthem “God Save the King,” satirized Ambrose in the same book that included his popular song, “Sally in Our Alley,” parodying Philips’s juvenile poems and writing: “So the nurses get by heart Namby-pamby’s little verses.” The author of Chrononho- tonthologos, a burlesque that he characterized as “the Most Tragical Tragedy that was ever Tragedized by any Company of Tragedians,” even entitled his parody of Philips Namby- Pamby—taking the amby in each word from the diminutive of Ambrose and the alliterative P in the last word from Phil- ips. Pope, ready for the kill, seized upon the contemptuous nickname and included it in the edition of his enormously popular poem “The Dunciad,” which appeared in 1733. The phrase immediately caught the public fancy and much to his distress, Ambrose Philips saw his name come to stand for not only feeble, insipidly sentimental writing, but a wishy-washy, weakly indecisive person as well. Philips, incidentally, is the author of the well-known palindrome “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.” See palindrome.

词汇	namby-pamby
词源	namby-pamby. Poor Ambrose Philips (ca. 1675–1749) had the bad luck to accidentally tread on Alexander Pope, easily the most venomous and malicious of the great English poets. Politics and envy had more to do with Philips’s misfortune than insipid versifying, for he was a Whig and Pope a Tory, and in 1713 the Whig Guardian praised the Whig pastoral poet as the only worthy successor of Spenser. This inane criti- cism enraged “the Wasp of Twickenham” and initiated a quar- rel between the two poets that Samuel Johnson described as a “perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.” Pope’s friend, poet, and composer Henry Carey soon joined in the fray. Carey, ru- mored author of the words and music of the British anthem “God Save the King,” satirized Ambrose in the same book that included his popular song, “Sally in Our Alley,” parodying Philips’s juvenile poems and writing: “So the nurses get by heart Namby-pamby’s little verses.” The author of Chrononho- tonthologos, a burlesque that he characterized as “the Most Tragical Tragedy that was ever Tragedized by any Company of Tragedians,” even entitled his parody of Philips Namby- Pamby—taking the amby in each word from the diminutive of Ambrose and the alliterative P in the last word from Phil- ips. Pope, ready for the kill, seized upon the contemptuous nickname and included it in the edition of his enormously popular poem “The Dunciad,” which appeared in 1733. The phrase immediately caught the public fancy and much to his distress, Ambrose Philips saw his name come to stand for not only feeble, insipidly sentimental writing, but a wishy-washy, weakly indecisive person as well. Philips, incidentally, is the author of the well-known palindrome “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.” See palindrome.
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