| 词汇 | boycott |
| 词源 | boycott. Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1823–97) lived to see his name immortalized as a synonym for a refusal to deal with a person or business firm, the word current not only in English but in French, German, Dutch, Russian, and a number of Asiatic languages as well. Boycott, a stubborn Brit- ish soldier turned farmer, had been hired to manage the Earl of Erne’s estates at Lough Mask House in Connaught, County Mayo, Ireland. Absentee landlords like the earl owned most of the land in Ireland at the time and were evicting poverty- stricken tenant farmers who could not pay their rents. The fiery Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell had already formed his Na- tional Land League, agitating for land reform by these “English usurpers.” In September 1880, Parnell addressed tenants near Connaught, advocating that anyone working a farm from which a man had been evicted, or any landlord refusing to ac- cept his new, reduced rent scales, should be ostracized “by iso- lating him . . . as if he were a leper of old . . . by leaving him strictly alone. . . .” When Captain Boycott harshly refused to ac- cept more reasonable lower rents and tried to evict one farmer, Boycott’s tenants forced his workers to leave him; organized marauders destroyed his property; his fences were torn down and cattle driven into his fields; he was refused service in all lo- cal stores; his mail went undelivered; he was jeered in the streets and hanged in effigy; and his life was repeatedly threatened. So successful had been the famous “excommunication” against him that it was commonly called a boycott in the papers within two months. |
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