| 词源 |
Chinese home run. Because Chinese immigrants were forced to work for little pay in a segregated society, their name came to mean “cheap” in American slang and formed the basis of a number of expressions. Chinese home run is the only one of these that still has much currency. It describes a cheap home run, one that just makes it over the fence. No one is sure who coined the phrase. It either arose in some ballpark on the West Coast at the turn of the century and was brought East by the cartoonist “Tad” Dorgan (who is also responsible for the words yes-man and hot dog), or it originated in a baseball park with a fence a relatively short distance from home, possibly the old 239-foot right-field fence in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, or the short right-field fence in New York’s old Polo Grounds. |