英语词汇hell for leather的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

hell for leather. After pondering various theories about the origin of hell for leather, several scholars have determined that it is a British expression first recorded by Rudolph Kipling in The Story of the Gadsbys and used again by him in Many Inven- tions and Barrack Room Ballads. Kipling may have invented this phrase meaning “to travel at great breakneck speed” by horse or by vehicle, or it may have been an army expression he adopted. It clearly suggests a rider (trooper or civilian) riding at full speed and beating against the leather saddle he rides on. However, the great scholar Ernest Weekley in his Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921) throws doubt upon this derivation. “My memory of it [the phrase hell for leather] goes back nearly fifty years,” he writes. “Can it [hell for leather] be for all of a lather [the foam in a racing horse’s mouth] with sec- ondary allusion to leather in [the] sporting sense of skin as af- fected by riding?” This may true be, and I would certainly trust Weekley’s memory of the expression first being used about 1870, some 20 years before Kipling employed it. A variation in the U.S. is hell-bent for leather, the word leather suggested by the hard use of a leather whip while riding a horse at a very fast pace.

词汇	hell for leather
词源	hell for leather. After pondering various theories about the origin of hell for leather, several scholars have determined that it is a British expression first recorded by Rudolph Kipling in The Story of the Gadsbys and used again by him in Many Inven- tions and Barrack Room Ballads. Kipling may have invented this phrase meaning “to travel at great breakneck speed” by horse or by vehicle, or it may have been an army expression he adopted. It clearly suggests a rider (trooper or civilian) riding at full speed and beating against the leather saddle he rides on. However, the great scholar Ernest Weekley in his Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921) throws doubt upon this derivation. “My memory of it [the phrase hell for leather] goes back nearly fifty years,” he writes. “Can it [hell for leather] be for all of a lather [the foam in a racing horse’s mouth] with sec- ondary allusion to leather in [the] sporting sense of skin as af- fected by riding?” This may true be, and I would certainly trust Weekley’s memory of the expression first being used about 1870, some 20 years before Kipling employed it. A variation in the U.S. is hell-bent for leather, the word leather suggested by the hard use of a leather whip while riding a horse at a very fast pace.
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