英语词汇no-man-s-land的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

no-man’s-land. World War I created many a no-man’s-land, but isn’t responsible for the phrase. No-man’s-land was first used in the early 14th century for the unowned wasteland out- side the north wall of London that was used as an execution site for criminals. For many years no one wanted to own this land where criminals were beheaded, hanged, or impaled, their rotting bodies left on display as a warning to lawbreakers. The place became known as no-man’s-land because no one claimed it, and the expression was soon applied figuratively to other places. About 400 years later no-man’s-land was applied to the little-used place on a ship’s forecastle where blocks, ropes, and tackle were stored. The term was first used in its military sense of the area between hostile entrenched lines in about 1900 and became famous in this sense during World War I. The dead could be seen in these no-man’s-lands just as they had been seen in the original six centuries before. “A wilderness of dead bodies,” the writer who first used the military term called it. In a letter to his mother British poet Wilfred Owen, killed in the war, wrote: “No Man’s land is pockmarked like the body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer . . . No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.” In another letter he spoke of “Hideous landscapes, vile noises . . . everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.”

词汇	no-man-s-land
词源	no-man’s-land. World War I created many a no-man’s-land, but isn’t responsible for the phrase. No-man’s-land was first used in the early 14th century for the unowned wasteland out- side the north wall of London that was used as an execution site for criminals. For many years no one wanted to own this land where criminals were beheaded, hanged, or impaled, their rotting bodies left on display as a warning to lawbreakers. The place became known as no-man’s-land because no one claimed it, and the expression was soon applied figuratively to other places. About 400 years later no-man’s-land was applied to the little-used place on a ship’s forecastle where blocks, ropes, and tackle were stored. The term was first used in its military sense of the area between hostile entrenched lines in about 1900 and became famous in this sense during World War I. The dead could be seen in these no-man’s-lands just as they had been seen in the original six centuries before. “A wilderness of dead bodies,” the writer who first used the military term called it. In a letter to his mother British poet Wilfred Owen, killed in the war, wrote: “No Man’s land is pockmarked like the body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer . . . No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.” In another letter he spoke of “Hideous landscapes, vile noises . . . everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.”
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