| 词汇 | blimp |
| 词源 | blimp. The word wasn’t coined, as Mencken’s story goes, by two Britishers while they were having “blunch” (or brunch, as it is called in America) at an airport. Nor was the nonrigid dirigi- ble airship so named by its manufacturer, the Goodyear Com- pany in the early years of World War I. It is often reported that Goodyear’s first model, the “A limp” (nonrigid), hadn’t worked and that their second model, the “B limp,” succeeded and kept its name, but Goodyear has denied that they or anyone else had airships with “limp” or type “B” designations. This leaves us with the possibility that the word is an onomatopoeic one, pos- sibly coined by a Lt. Cunningham of the British Royal Navy Air Service in 1915. Cunningham, according to this story, flicked his thumb at one of the airships while on an inspection tour and “an odd noise echoed off the taut fabric. . . . [He] orally im- itated the sound his thumb had drummed out of the airship bag: ‘Blimp!’ Those nearby saw and heard this unusual inter- lude in the inspection, and its account quickly spread.” |
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