短編 Mkondo を読んでいます。米国人のWard Beachはタンザニアの女性と結婚し、その女性を連れてオハイオに帰ります。
She had come to Ohio: she had taken that final, extra step. Now what? she thought. Now what am I supposed to do? Turn back? By August--she had been there a year--she was sobbing at night. The Ohio sky had become a tangible weight, bending the stalk of her neck, loading down her shoulders. She slumped through the hours. Ward, anxious to try anything, drobe her out of the city: barns on hills, threshers in fields.
"threshers in fields" は何でしょう？ 農機具の一種だと思いますが、分からないので辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A person or machine that separates grain from the plants by beating.: Agriculture thrives on the other side of those hills; grain threshers reaping wheat, trucks full of tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelons.
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: one that threshes; especially threshing machine: a machine for separating grain crops into grain or seeds and straw
脱穀機ですね。都会に住んでいるので実物は見た事がありません。
短編 Mkondo を読んでいます。オハイオから来たWard Beachはタンザニアで若い女性と知り合います。
During dinner he'd describe where he was from; Ohio,...
He invented half-accurate natural histories of Ohio: dinosaurs battling on the plains; vast flocks of prehistoric geese flowing over stunted tree.
"stunted tree" が分かりません。"stunt man" の "stunt" と同じスペルですが、私の知らない別の意味があるに違いありません。辞書を見ます。"stunt man" ・Vocabulary.com: inferior in size or quality: old stunted thorn trees
・Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: prevented from growing or developing to the usual size: A few stunted trees were the only vegetation visible.: children with stunted growth
・Wiktionary: prevented from growing or developing: The plant's growth was stunted because it was placed in a closet.
上の説明は形容詞としての "stunted" の意味ですが、"stunt" には動詞で成長、生育を妨げる意味がありました。
短編集The Shell Collectionの最後の短編 "Mkondo" (noun. Current, flow, rush, passage, run, e.g., of water in a river or poured on the ground; of air through a door or window, i.e., a draft; of the wake of a ship, a track, the run of an animal.)を読んでいます。
Ward Beachは米国オハイオの自然歴史博物館から恐竜の化石発掘のためにタンザニアに行きます。
Locusts screamed in a bank of eucalyptus behind the nursery; the first stars guttered overhead. Ward had filled the flatbed of the truck with basketed flowers: hibiscus, lantana, honeysuckle, others he could not guess the name of.
"gutter" は名詞の意味しか知らないのですが、引用文に出てきた "guttered" はその意味からは類推できないので辞書を引きます。
・ Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: (of a flame or candle) to burn unevenly and weakly, especially before completely stopping burning: a guttering candle
・Vocabulary.com: burn unsteadily, feebly, or low; flicker: The cooling lava continued to gutter toward lower ground.
なるほど、チラチラと光る感じですね。辞書をよく見ると水がチョロチョロと流れるのにも使えそうです。
・Vocabulary.com: flow in small streams: Tears guttered down her face
The Care Takerから取り上げる最後の単語です。
He smells the sweet fruit of a tomato, pink now with a swatch of yellow on one side, and the aroma is almost too much to bear.
スイスの時計と同じスペルの "swatch" が出て来ましたがどんな意味でしょうか？
・Oxford English Dictionary: A patch or area of a material or surface: the sunset had filled the sky with swatches of deep orange
・Collins Dictionary: 1. a sample of cloth 2. a number of such samples, usually fastened together in book form 3.(printing) a. a small sample of colour supplied to the printer for matching during printing b.a sample of ink spread on paper by a printer to check the accuracy of a required colour
小説での用例の意味に直接あう説明を記載しているのはOxford English Dictionaryだけで、他の辞書にはほとんどCollins Dictionaryと同じ様な説明しかありませんでしたが、恐らく語源は布のサンプル生地から来ている様だ。
After God had created Adam he noticed that he looked very lonely. He decided to help.
He said "Adam, I've decided to make you a woman.
She'll love you, cook for you, be sweet to you, and understand you."
Adam said "Great! How much will she cost me?"
The answer came back, "An arm and a leg."
"Well," said Adam "What can I get for a rib?"
Note: "An arm and a leg" means a large amount of money.
ノーベル平和賞をもらったマララさんの授賞式でのスピーチが先日の朝日新聞に掲載されていたので読みました。私が最も強い印象を受けたのは次の個所です。
Why is it that countries which we call "strong" are so powerful in creating wars but are so weak in bringing peace? Why is it that giving guns is so easy but giving books is so hard? Why is it that making tanks is so easy, but building schools in so hard?
戦争を作り出しているのは強い国だけではなく、国民が貧困に喘ぎ、子供に満足な教育を与えていないのに核兵器の獲得に熱をあげている為政者のいる国もその元凶です。国とは言えないイスラム国やアルカイダの組織の人間たちもこのマララさんの言葉に耳を傾けて欲しいのですが、いつになったらマララさんの声は彼らに届くのでしょうか？
難しい問題はさておき、マララさんのスピーチに一つだけ私の知らない単語がありました。
When I was in Swat, which was a place of tourism and beaty, suddenly changed into a place of destroyed. Women were flogged. People were killed. And our beautiful dreams turned into nightmares.
Education went from being a right to being a crime. Girls were stopped from going to school.
When my world suddenly changed, my priorities changed too.
I had two options, one was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the second one. I decided to speak up.
"flog" がその単語です。 辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Beat (someone) with a whip or stick as punishment or torture: the stolen horses will be returned and the thieves flogged
・Vocabulary.com: To flog is to beat or hit, especially with a tool like a stick or rod. A cruel trainer might flog an unruly horse with a whip.
When you flog someone, you beat them as a way of punishing or controlling them. In the old days, teachers were allowed to flog misbehaving students, and it wasn't uncommon for parents to flog their children as punishment. In fact, the word flog first appeared as school slang in the late 1600s — it's thought to be a shortened form of the Latin word flagellare, "flagellate," or "whip."
マララさんの故国や世界中から "flog" などと言う単語は、映画やＴＶのドラマでしか必要のない言葉になると良いのですが。
短編 "The Care Taker" に出てきた表題の単語は直ぐに覚えられそうです。
"You are, what, fifteen years old? You cannot drive to South America. You would be kidnapped. You would run out of petrol." He laughs, then, and puts his hand over his mouth. After a moment he begins to work, his fingers prying a leaf miner from the underside of a melon. Belle studies her map in the paling light.
"leaf miner" ですが、何でこんなところに "miner" が出てくるのかと不思議に思いました。"leaf miner" を辞書で調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A small fly, moth, beetle, or sawfly whose larvae burrow between the two surfaces of a leaf.: They help to repel leaf miner moths and some gardeners even find them effective against grasshoppers.
・Collins Dictionary: any of various insect larvae that bore into and feed on leaf tissue, esp the larva of dipterous flies of the genus Philophylla (family Trypetidae) and the caterpillar of moths of the family Gracillariidae: Dacnusa sibirica is an endoparasite which parasitizes by laying an egg in the leaf miner larva.
・Wikipedia: A leaf miner is the larva of an insect that lives in and eats the leaf tissue of plants. The vast majority of leaf-mining insects are moths (Lepidoptera), sawflies (Symphyta) and flies (Diptera), though beetles and wasps also exhibit this behavior.
なるほど、葉に筋模様をつけるあの害虫の事を指しているのですね。知ってしまうと実に分かり易い名称だと感心します。
The CaretakerのJosephは屋敷を追い出されましたが、三日かかって元の雇い主の敷地に戻り、広大な敷地内で野宿を始め、植物の栽培も始めました。フィリッピンやグアム島に残された元日本兵のようです。
He agonizes over what to do next. Should he water more, or less? Should he prune, mulch, heel in, make cuttings? Should he limb the surrounding trees, clear some of the bramble away to provide more light?
上に出てきた "heel in" は農作業の一つだと思いますが何でしょう？
・Collins Dictionary: to insert (cuttings, shoots, etc) into the soil before planting to keep them moist
・Dictionary.com: heel in, to cover temporarily (the roots and most of the stem of a plant) with soil prior to permanent planting.
・GardenWeb Glossary of Botanical Terms: To temporarily store plants with their roots in moist soil or sawdust to hold them for several days or weeks until they are able to be planted properly.
田植の作業と似ていますが、一般の米国人でもこの "heel in" の意味を知っているのでしょうか？
注： "mulch" は日本語でもマルチとして使われています。スペルに注意
The Caretakerの主人公のJosephは仕事を首になります。
Twyman's wife drives him north in a sleek, silent truck, the wipers slipping smoothly over the windshield. She keeps one hand in her purse, clenched around what Joseph guesses to be Mace or perhaps a gun. She thinks I am an idiot, thinks Joseph.
"perhaps a gun" と書かれていますから "Mace" も何か物騒なの様です。辞書を見ます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: trademark: An irritant chemical used in an aerosol to disable attackers.: You can't pull your gun, no Mace - why don't we just arm-wrestle to see if you go to jail?
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: used for a liquid that stings the eyes and skin and that is used as a spray to defend against an attacker: She maced the man who attacked her.
大文字で始まっているので商標から来た単語だと分かりますが、小文字の "mace" に元々こんな意味がありました。
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: a heavy often spiked staff or club used especially in the Middle Ages for breaking armor
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