English Collection

日頃目に付いた覚えたい英単語、慣用句などの表現についてのメモです。

peach fuzz / good chance

2017年01月12日 | 英語の本を読む

Reader's Digest 11月号の記事からの引用です。
Cori Salchert of Sheboygan Wisconsin, sits on a hospital bed parked in the middle of her living room stroking the peach fuzz on top of her newly adopted son's head. One-year-old Charlie is at ease in his mother's arms, drifting off to the hum of his ventilator. His mother adopted him knowing that there was a good chance he would not live long.
文脈からすると "peach fuzz" は産毛のようですが、初めて見る表現なので辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: The down on the chin of an adolescent boy whose beard has not yet developed.: He rubbed his chin, feeling the peach fuzz that was slowly becoming real facial hair. developed.
"fuzz" だけでも同じような意味になるようです。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A fluffy or frizzy mass of hair or fiber.: a fuzz of black hair: his face was covered with white fuzz
・Cambridge English Dictionary: a covering of short thin soft hairs, or a mass of tightly curled and often untidy hair: He's got that bit of adolescent fuzz on his upper lip.
長生きしない可能性が高いことに "good chance" と "good" が使われていることが気になりました。辞書のこの用法を調べます。
・Cambridge English Dictionary: used to emphasize the large number, amount, or level of something: Not all of his movies have been successful - there were a good few (= several) failures in the early years.
・Wiktionary: He's had a good amount of troubles, he has.
この用法の "good" は直後の単語の量を形容していて、その後の失敗や問題が良くても悪くても構わないのですね。

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