| 词源 |
pelican. The pelican is no woodpecker, but in his famous translation of the Bible, St. Jerome, thinking it pecked wood like a woodpecker, named the bird pelican, from the Greek word pelekys, or “ax beak.” This name stuck, as did many leg- ends about the bird, including one that it resurrected its dead young by feeding them its blood, which Shakespeare alludes to in King Lear. Wrote Dixon Lanier Merrith in his poem “The Pelican” (1910): “A wonderful bird is the/pelican/His bill will hold more than his/belican./He can take in his beak/Food enough for a week,/But I’m damned if I see how the/helican.” |