英语词汇build or set a fire under的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

build (or set) a fire under. Ornery mules may be responsible for the expression to set a fire under, or “to stir someone to ac- tion or movement”: southern farmers, it is said, sometimes built fires under their mules to get the beasts to move when they were standing with four legs spread and refusing to budge despite every other tactic. Palmer Clark, research librarian at the Van Noy Library in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, advises that rela- tives of hers in the “chuggy huggy hills of Tennessee” were fa- miliar with the practice. “Aunt Clellie,” Mrs. Clark writes, “said when she was a young girl, loads of cedar were transported to Murfreesboro from Hall’s Hill Pike. She distinctly remembered that her brother-in-law . . . literally and actually built fires un- der the mules who hauled the cedar to get them going [this about 1921 or 1922 in middle Tennessee].”

词汇	build or set a fire under
词源	build (or set) a fire under. Ornery mules may be responsible for the expression to set a fire under, or “to stir someone to ac- tion or movement”: southern farmers, it is said, sometimes built fires under their mules to get the beasts to move when they were standing with four legs spread and refusing to budge despite every other tactic. Palmer Clark, research librarian at the Van Noy Library in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, advises that rela- tives of hers in the “chuggy huggy hills of Tennessee” were fa- miliar with the practice. “Aunt Clellie,” Mrs. Clark writes, “said when she was a young girl, loads of cedar were transported to Murfreesboro from Hall’s Hill Pike. She distinctly remembered that her brother-in-law . . . literally and actually built fires un- der the mules who hauled the cedar to get them going [this about 1921 or 1922 in middle Tennessee].”
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