英语词汇cold feet的起源、历史背景-英语词源词典

cold feet. The old Italian expression avegh minga frecc i pee lit- erally means “to have cold feet” and the proverb in a figurative sense of “to be without money” was used by Ben Jonson in his play Volpone. Professor Kenneth McKenzie pointed this out in an article in Modern Language Notes (Vol. XXVII, 1912) and also explained how a phrase meaning “to be without money” could come to mean “to lose one’s nerve.” In card-playing, he wrote, a player “as a pretext for quitting a game in which he has lost money, [might] say that his feet are cold, [and] the expres- sion might come to mean in general ‘to recede from a difficult position,’ or more specifically, ‘to have cold feet.’ ” This may be true, but if it is, it didn’t happen in Ben Jonson’s time, to the best of our knowledge. Cold feet in the sense of “fear,” originated as an American expression in the early 1890s. It could, however, have journeyed here with Italian immigrants, as the Italian proverb was still used in Lombardy at the time. Otherwise the expression must be marked “of unknown origin” and perhaps refers to the association of fright with cold—chattering teeth, shivers, and chills, etc.

词汇	cold feet
词源	cold feet. The old Italian expression avegh minga frecc i pee lit- erally means “to have cold feet” and the proverb in a figurative sense of “to be without money” was used by Ben Jonson in his play Volpone. Professor Kenneth McKenzie pointed this out in an article in Modern Language Notes (Vol. XXVII, 1912) and also explained how a phrase meaning “to be without money” could come to mean “to lose one’s nerve.” In card-playing, he wrote, a player “as a pretext for quitting a game in which he has lost money, [might] say that his feet are cold, [and] the expres- sion might come to mean in general ‘to recede from a difficult position,’ or more specifically, ‘to have cold feet.’ ” This may be true, but if it is, it didn’t happen in Ben Jonson’s time, to the best of our knowledge. Cold feet in the sense of “fear,” originated as an American expression in the early 1890s. It could, however, have journeyed here with Italian immigrants, as the Italian proverb was still used in Lombardy at the time. Otherwise the expression must be marked “of unknown origin” and perhaps refers to the association of fright with cold—chattering teeth, shivers, and chills, etc.
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