penury

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。

Chivalry is uneconomical: it boasts of penury. It says with Ventidius that "ambition, the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him." Don Quixote takes more pride in his rusty spear and skin-and-bone horse than in gold and lands, and a samurai is in hearty sympathy with his exaggerated confrère of La Mancha. He disdains money itself,--the art of making or hoarding it. It was to him veritably filthy lucre. The hackneyed expression to describe the decadence of an age was "that the civilians loved money and the soldiers feared death." Niggardliness of gold and of life excited as much disapprobation as their lavish use was panegyrised. "Less than all things," says a current precept, "men must grudge money: it is by riches that

難しい単語が二つ、"penury" と "panegyrised" 出てきました。最初に "penury" を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: the state of being very poor: He died in penury.
・Collins Dictionary: Penury is the state of being extremely poor.: [formal] He was brought up in penury, without education.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the state of being extremely poor: Facing penury he retired to a room over the garage, wrote twelve hours a day for five weeks, and rejoined the middle classes.

この単語 "penury" は覚えたい。

"panegyrised" は英国のつづりなので米国つづりの "panegyrize" で辞書を見ます。

・Wiktionary: o praise, especially in an eloquent speech or in writing.: Whenever a public question comes to such a crisis that the opportunities for individual intervention are reduced to the smallest possible compass, Mr. Roebuck is sure to step in with a formula, summing up the case with indignant brevity, censuring somebody, or panegyrizing somebody.
・Dictionary.com: to indulge in panegyric; bestow praises.: Of course he would have found it hard to panegyrize his favourite democracies when he came to the Hellenistic age.

この "panegyrised" に出会うことは何年も後でしょうね。当然忘れています。

equivocation

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。VERACITY OR TRUTHFULNESSの章から引用します。

Lying or equivocation were deemed equally cowardly. The bushi held that his high social position demanded a loftier standard of veracity than that of the tradesman and peasant. Bushi no ichi-gon—the word of a samurai or in exact German equivalent ein Ritterwort—was sufficient guaranty of the truthfulness of an assertion.

"equivocation" の意味は "lying" と同類項のようですが、辞書で確認します。

・Oxford English Dictionary: a way of behaving or speaking that is not clear or definite and is intended to avoid or hide the truth: These actions must be condemned without equivocation.
・Collins Dictionary: the use of equivocal or ambiguous expressions, esp. in order to mislead or hedge; prevarication: There was no equivocation in his stare; no attempt to pretend he was looking elsewhere.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: to speak in a way that is intentionally not clear and confusing to other people, especially to hide the truth: She accused the minister of equivocating, claiming that he had deliberately avoided telling the public how bad the problem really was.

嘘をついてはないが、言い逃れもしくはとぼけている様子ですね。

mailed

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。BENEVOLENCE, THE FEELING OF DISTRESSの章から引用します。

His master, undaunted by the crude sentiment, continued to encourage the youth, until one day the music of his soul was awakened to respond to the sweet notes of the uguisu, and he wrote
Stands the warrior, mailed and strong,
To hear the uguisu’s song,
Warbled sweet the trees among.”

"mailed" の "mail" は日本語にもなっているメールの意味ではなく、以前にも取り上げた記憶はありますが、意味が思いだせません。 "mail" の意味を辞書で確認します。

・Collins Dictionary: (verb) to cover or protect with or as with mail; (noun) flexible body armor made of small, overlapping metal rings, loops of chain, or scales

前回（11/22/2013）は "mailed fist" の表現に会った時に "mail" の意味を調べていました。

inure

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。COURAGE, THE SPIRIT OF DARING AND BEARINGの章から引用します。

Parents, with sternness sometimes verging on cruelty, set their children to tasks that called forth all the pluck that was in them. “Bears hurl their cubs down the gorge,” they said. Samurai’s sons were let down the steep valleys of hardship, and spurred to Sisyphus-like tasks. Occasional deprivation of food or exposure to cold, was considered a highly efficacious test for inuring them to endurance. Children of tender age were sent among utter strangers with some message to deliver, were made to rise before the sun, and before breakfast attend to their reading exercises, walking to their teacher with bare feet in the cold of winter; they frequently—once or twice a month, as on the festival of a god of learning,-—came together in small groups and passed the night without sleep, in reading aloud by turns.

"inure" は以前契約書をよく読む機会があった時に「効力を生じる」意味で使われていたことを思い出しましたが、上記の例での意味を確認します。

・Oxford English Dictionary: (formal) to make somebody/yourself get used to something unpleasant so that they/you are no longer strongly affected by it: The prisoners quickly became inured to the harsh conditions.
・Collins Dictionary: (usually fol. by to) to accustom to hardship, difficulty, pain, etc.; toughen or harden; habituate: inured to cold

困難な事などに慣れさせる意味で使われるのですね。私が知っていたのは (esp of a law, etc) to come into operation; take effectの用法の方でした。

solipsism

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。SOURCES OF BUSHIDOの章から引用します。

I am inclined to think that the Japanese mind, as expressed in the simple tenets of the Shinto religion, was particularly open to the reception of Yang Ming’s precepts. He carried his doctrine of the infallibility of conscience to extreme transcendentalism, attributing to it the faculty to perceive, not only the distinction between right and wrong, but also the nature of psychical facts and physical phenomena. He went as far as, if not farther than, Berkeley and Fichte, in Idealism, denying the existence of things outside of human ken. If his system had all the logical errors charged to Solipsism, it had all the efficacy of strong conviction and its moral import in developing individuality of character and equanimity of temper cannot be gainsaid.

"Solipsism" を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: the theory that only the self exists or can be known:
・Collins Dictionary: the extreme form of scepticism which denies the possibility of any knowledge other than of one's own existence: Idealistic pluralism rejects the idea of solipsism, which would be an idealistic monism.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the belief that only your own experiences and existence can be known: But lesbianism, at the time, was usually viewed as a kind of narcissistic solipsism, and this weakened its subversive force.