| 词汇 | cockroach |
| 词源 | cockroach. Captain John Smith must have had a lot of trou- ble with cockroaches, judging by his description of the noctur- nal household pest in his The generall historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles (1624). Smith described the in- sect as “A certaine India Bug, called by the Spaniards a Caca- rootch, the which creeping into Chests they wat and defile with their ill-scented dung.” His rendition of the Spanish cucaracha as cacarootch started the long and involved process whereby the name for the bug became cockroach in English. The most famous literary cockroach is undoubtedly American humorist Don Marquis’s Archy, who wrote modern free verse because he couldn’t work the typewriter shift key—along with his friend Mehitabel the cat, he is immortalized in archy and mehitabel (1927) and a number of sequels. It was once thought that the smell of the cockroach apple, a Jamaican plant, would kill cockroaches. |
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