| 词源 |
play the sedulous ape. Robert Louis Stevenson originated the phrase in a charming essay in which he wrote: “I have played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. . . . That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write.” Sedulous, from the Latin sedulus, “care- ful,” means diligent and persevering in application or atten- tion, so the phrase describes anyone who slavishly imitates somebody. |