| 词源 |
God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Since lambs are never shorn, Laurence Sterne’s phrase, from his Sentimental Journey (1782), seems to make little sense. Sterne coined it from an earlier, less poetic expression—invented some 140 years before—that said To a close-shorn sheep, God gives wind by mea- sure. But George Herbert, its author, got it in turn from a French saying in Henri Estienne’s Premices (1594), which said God reg- ulates the cold to the shorn lamb. Poetry usually triumphs. |