英语词汇cat-s cradle的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

cat’s cradle. Word detectives have given this one up as a bad job. The first mention of the child’s game is in a little-known book called The Light of Nature Pursued (1768), in which the author attempts to explain it: “An ingenious play they call cat’s cradle; one ties the two ends of a packthread together, and then winds it about his fingers, another with both hands takes it off perhaps in the shape of a gridiron, the first takes it again from him in another form, and so on alternately changing the pack- thread into a multitude of figures whose names I forget, it being so many years since I played it myself.” Some say that sugges- tions that the game’s name is a corruption of cratch-cradle, the manger cradle in which Christ was born, are not founded in facts. The story I was told when a boy had it that the first figure in the game resembled a cratch, a medieval English word for a hayrack, while the last figure resembled a cradle. Supposedly the game was first called cratch-cradle and this was changed to cat’s cradle in later years when the hay cratch was no longer used or familiar to people—not because cats had anything to do with the game but because the word cat sounded something like cratch. Moreover, before its meaning as a hayrack, cratch was a verb meaning “to seize, snatch, grab”—so maybe the cratching, or grabbing, of the string became the cat in the name. Then again perhaps I, too, should give this one up.

词汇	cat-s cradle
词源	cat’s cradle. Word detectives have given this one up as a bad job. The first mention of the child’s game is in a little-known book called The Light of Nature Pursued (1768), in which the author attempts to explain it: “An ingenious play they call cat’s cradle; one ties the two ends of a packthread together, and then winds it about his fingers, another with both hands takes it off perhaps in the shape of a gridiron, the first takes it again from him in another form, and so on alternately changing the pack- thread into a multitude of figures whose names I forget, it being so many years since I played it myself.” Some say that sugges- tions that the game’s name is a corruption of cratch-cradle, the manger cradle in which Christ was born, are not founded in facts. The story I was told when a boy had it that the first figure in the game resembled a cratch, a medieval English word for a hayrack, while the last figure resembled a cradle. Supposedly the game was first called cratch-cradle and this was changed to cat’s cradle in later years when the hay cratch was no longer used or familiar to people—not because cats had anything to do with the game but because the word cat sounded something like cratch. Moreover, before its meaning as a hayrack, cratch was a verb meaning “to seize, snatch, grab”—so maybe the cratching, or grabbing, of the string became the cat in the name. Then again perhaps I, too, should give this one up.
随便看	easy as rolling off a log easy as silk easy as taking candy from a baby easy come easy go easy does it easy rider easy street eat crow eat dog for another eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die eat humble pie eating rat eatin’ a green -simmon eat me out of house and home eat one-s hat eat one-s words eat something with one toe in the fire eat the yank way eat’m and beat’m eavesdropper eavestrough ebb tide ecce homo eccentric ecdysiast