- bloomer
[bloomer 词源字典] - bloomer: [19] Bloomers, long loose trousers worn by women, were not actually invented by someone called Bloomer – the credit for that seems to go to a Mrs Elizabeth Smith Miller of New York – but their first advocate was Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–94), a US feminist who strongly promoted their use in the early 1850s as a liberated garment for women. The extent to which this became a cause célèbre can be gauged by the fact that it gave rise to so-called Bloomerism, a movement for ‘rationalizing’ women’s dress; in 1882 Lady Harberton wrote in Macmillan’s Magazine ‘“Bloomerism” still lurks in many a memory’. Bloomer ‘mistake’ is late 19th-century, and apparently originally Australian.
Early commentators derived it, not altogether convincingly, from ‘blooming error’.
[bloomer etymology, bloomer origin, 英语词源] - body
- body: [OE] For a word so central to people’s perception of themselves, body is remarkably isolated linguistically. Old High German had potah ‘body’, traces of which survived dialectally into modern times, but otherwise it is without known relatives in any other Indo- European language. Attempts have been made, not altogether convincingly, to link it with words for ‘container’ or ‘barrel’, such as medieval Latin butica. The use of body to mean ‘person in general’, as in somebody, nobody, got fully under way in the 14th century.
- cod
- cod: [13] Like most fish-names, the origins of cod are obscure. It has been suggested, not all that convincingly, that it comes from another word cod [OE], now obsolete, which meant broadly ‘pouch’ – the idea being that the fish supposedly has a ‘baglike’ appearance. Among the specific applications of this other cod, which was of Germanic origin, were ‘seedcase’ (which survived into the twentieth century in the archaic compound peascod ‘pea pod’) and ‘scrotum’.
By transference the latter came to mean ‘testicles’, whence codpiece, a 15th- to 17thcentury garment somewhat analogous to the jockstrap. The cuttle of cuttlefish comes from the same source.
=> cuttlefish - shy
- shy: Shy ‘timid, reserved’ [OE] goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *skeukhwaz ‘afraid’ (source also of English eschew and skew). It is generally assumed that shy ‘throw’ [18] must have come from it, but the exact nature of the relationship between the two words is not clear. The original application of the verb seems to have been specifically to the throwing of sticks at chickens, and it has been suggested, not altogether convincingly, that its use alludes to the notion of a ‘shy’ cockerel that refuses to fight (there was an 18th- and early 19th-century slang term shy-cock which meant ‘cowardly person’).
=> eschew, skew - bikini (n.)
- "low-waisted two-piece women's bathing suit," 1948, from French coinage, 1947, named for U.S. A-bomb test of June 1946 on Bikini, Marshall Islands atoll, locally Pikinni and said to derive from pik "surface" and ni "coconut," but this is uncertain. Various explanations for the swimsuit name have been suggested, none convincingly, the best being an analogy of the explosive force of the bomb and the impact of the bathing suit style on men's libidos (compare c. 1900 British slang assassin "an ornamental bow worn on the female breast," so called because it was very "killing").
Bikini, ce mot cinglant comme l'explosion même ... correspondant au niveau du vêtement de plage à on anéantissement de la surface vêtue; à une minimisation extrême de la pudeur. [Le Monde, 1947]
As a style of scanty briefs, from 1960. Variant trikini (1967), with separate bra cups held on by Velcro, falsely presumes a compound in bi-. - convince (v.)
- 1520s, "to overcome in argument," from Latin convincere "to overcome decisively," from com-, intensive prefix (see com-), + vincere "to conquer" (see victor). Meaning "to firmly persuade" is from c. 1600. Related: Convinced; convincing; convincingly.
- fictive (adj.)
- 1610s, "formed by imagination," from French fictif, from stem of Latin fictio (see fiction). Earlier as "convincingly deceptive" (late 15c.). Related: Fictively.
