| 词汇 | going like 60 |
| 词源 | going like 60. In 1860 a terrible drought in the Missouri and Arkansas valleys devastated that part of the country, lasting more than a year. Some tracers of lost word origins believe that the memory of the drought was so vivid that people began linking the year 1860 with extremes of any kind. But the drought could only have reinforced and possibly accelerated the meaning of the popular expression going like 60, for it was used by James Russell Lowell in his Biglow Papers in 1848 (“Though like sixty all along I fumed an’ fussed”) and was re- corded in an early 1860 slang dictionary as “[to go] at a good rate, briskly.” Perhaps 60 is used simply to express a large number, as an abbreviation of “like 60 miles an hour,” or some- thing similar. “Forty” was used in this way at least since Shake- speare’s Coriolanus (1607), and in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) a character says: “I has principles and I stick to them like forty.” |
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