| 词源 |
cat’s-paw. A cat’s-paw is light air during a calm that moves as silently as a cat and causes ripples on the water, indicating a coming storm. The term is recorded as early as 1769. Captain Frederick Marryat wrote in Jacob Faithful (1834): “Cat’s paws of wind, as they call them, flew across the water here and there, ruffling its smooth surface.” In the old folktale a monkey tricks a cat into using its paw to pull chestnuts from a fire, the mon- key getting the nuts and the cat getting a burnt paw. From the tale comes our expression cat’s-paw, for “a dupe.” |