英语词汇codswallop的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

codswallop. I came across codswallop in a newspaper ac- count about a scientist’s charge that a rare and extremely im- portant bird fossil (the archaeopteryx, pronounced “arky- opterix”) in the British Museum was a fake. The account quoted several British Museum curators on the charge: “It’s rubbish,” one official said. “Absolutely ludicrous,” added another. “Cods- wallop,” echoed a third. Codswallop? Does it mean to flop about like a cod, in reference to the scandalmonger’s tongue. Wallop does mean in one sense “to flop about.” Or does it stand for “cod’s beer,” meaning the charge is an awful concoction? (Wal- lop is British slang for beer.) To tell the truth I don’t know. And neither does the O.E.D., Mencken, Flexner, Partridge, and all those other high-flying etymology birds. Hawkeyed William Safire, however, noted in his New York Times Magazine column that James McDonald’s Wordly Wise (1984) mentions a 19th- century “inventor called Hiram Codd [who] patented a new type of bottle with a glass marble in its neck. Mineral waters were sold in such bottles, and, wallop being a slang term for fizzy ale, the contents became known as Codd’s Wallop.” And if this explanation doesn’t satisfy you, either, perhaps codswallop, as Mr. Safire also points out, derives in some way from the Brit- ish slang cod, meaning “to horse around.”

词汇	codswallop
词源	codswallop. I came across codswallop in a newspaper ac- count about a scientist’s charge that a rare and extremely im- portant bird fossil (the archaeopteryx, pronounced “arky- opterix”) in the British Museum was a fake. The account quoted several British Museum curators on the charge: “It’s rubbish,” one official said. “Absolutely ludicrous,” added another. “Cods- wallop,” echoed a third. Codswallop? Does it mean to flop about like a cod, in reference to the scandalmonger’s tongue. Wallop does mean in one sense “to flop about.” Or does it stand for “cod’s beer,” meaning the charge is an awful concoction? (Wal- lop is British slang for beer.) To tell the truth I don’t know. And neither does the O.E.D., Mencken, Flexner, Partridge, and all those other high-flying etymology birds. Hawkeyed William Safire, however, noted in his New York Times Magazine column that James McDonald’s Wordly Wise (1984) mentions a 19th- century “inventor called Hiram Codd [who] patented a new type of bottle with a glass marble in its neck. Mineral waters were sold in such bottles, and, wallop being a slang term for fizzy ale, the contents became known as Codd’s Wallop.” And if this explanation doesn’t satisfy you, either, perhaps codswallop, as Mr. Safire also points out, derives in some way from the Brit- ish slang cod, meaning “to horse around.”
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