| 词汇 | thumbs down |
| 词源 | thumbs down. First, we have the traditional story: Habet! or “He’s had it,” Roman spectators shouted when they wanted a defeated gladiator to be killed. Their shouts were accompanied by a thumbs-down gesture that is believed to be the ancestor of the same gesture we use today and of our expression thumbs down for “no!” Some Latinists, however, say that thumbs down is a mistranslation of the Latin phrase pollice verso, which means “thumbs turned.” According to this theory, spectators made the gesture pollice primo, “thumbs in front,” when a gladiator fought a good fight, and made the gesture pollice ver- so if he fought poorly and they wanted him killed. The idea that pollice verso meant “thumbs down,” this story holds, seems to have been first suggested by a painting of 19th-century French artist Jean Léon Gérôme that depicted scowling Ro- man spectators holding their thumbs down at the end of a gladiatorial contest. |
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