| 词汇 | to bant |
| 词源 | to bant; banting. William Banting (1797–1878) might have made a fortune had he published his booklet on dieting a cen- tury later, in our own weight-conscious era. As it turned out, he merely amused Londoners in the mid-1860s, although his name did become a word. Banting was an enormously over- weight cabinetmaker and undertaker who couldn’t bend to tie his shoelaces and had to walk downstairs backwards to relieve the pressure on his legs. Convinced by his own discomfort, and perhaps from his undertaking activities, that many deaths re- sulted from overeating, he went on a strict diet, losing 46 pounds and taking 12 inches off his waist. As so many dieters do, he then wrote a book about his experience, setting forth his method of reducing. “Bantingism” called for a meat diet and abstention from practically everything else—beer, butter, sugar, farinaceous foods, and even vegetables. Needless to say, it wasn’t popular very long, but Londoners humorously took to calling dieting banting and to diet to bant. |
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