light-fingered

Reader's Digest ３月号の記事 'Why Didn't I Think of That?' から引用します。
犯人を取り押さえて警察に渡しても、軽い罰なので、いっこうに減らない万引きに悩む店の経営者が考えた苦肉の策は？。
The management hired a marching band, bought flowers, and made signs celebrating a "10,000th shoplifter."
Then, when secrity spotted a woman on the in-store camera nicking some clothes, employees descended on her, jubilantly saluting her light-fingered ways. The embarassed woman stood stunned amid the fracas. Then she pulled the party hat off her head, took a piece of "10,000th shoplifter" cake, and made her escape, the band in hot purshut.
日本語の「手癖の悪い」を連想させる "light-fingered" ですが、辞書で意味を確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Prone to steal.: light-fingered shoplifters
・Collins Dictionary: having nimble or agile fingers, esp for thieving or picking pockets: But I do have designs on your... shall we say, light-fingered talents?

aptronym

Reader's Digest ３月号に接尾辞 "-nym" が付く言葉についての記事がありました。その中の "aptronym" に興味を覚えました。
"Aptronym": A name that is perfectly suited to its owner; think the poet William Wordsworth. Here are more real examples: A Los Angels lawyer is blessed with a name that puts fear in the hearts of her opponents: Sue Yoo.
An Indiana hunter was shot in the foot after his dog stepped on the man's shotgun. The dog's name: Trigger.
なるほど、辞書での説明と例を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A person's name that is regarded as amusingly appropriate to their occupation.: He began collecting aptronyms when he saw an ad for a flower shop operated by Flora Gardner.
・Wikipedia: An aptronym, aptonym or euonym is a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner.: Donald Trump, American businessman and politician whose name Slate called an aptronym because "When Trump resorts to name-calling, holds raucous rallies that draw audiences in the thousands, and employs media savvy that makes him the subject of every conversation, he is playing the trump card."

duck blind

今日は Reader's Digest ３月号の記事 'I Survived Drowning' の記事に出てきた表現を取り上げます。
It's the Saturday before Thanksgiving, 1 a.m., and my chocolate Lab, Stormy, and I are headed for a duck blind a few hours north.
"Lab" は犬のLabrador Retrieverの事です。知りたいのは "duck blind" です。　辞書を見ます。
・The American Heritage Dictionary: A shelter, often camouflaged with reeds and grasses, for concealing duck hunters.
・Wikipedia: A hunting blind is a cover device for hunters, designed to reduce the chance of detection. There are different types of blinds for different situations, such as deer blinds and duck blinds. Some are exceedingly simple, while others are complex. The legality of various kinds of blinds may vary according to municipality.
なるほど、野生動物の観察には欠かせない装置ですね。

din

今日取り上げる単語は Reader's Digest, March 2017の記事 'Life' からです。
My nephew and his friends picked my daughter and me up from the airport. For the next three hours, he had the radio cranked to ten.
"How can you talk with the music so loud?" I yelled over the din.
He hollered back, "We don't have to talk. We all know the same things."
"din" は知らない単語なので辞書を引きます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A loud, unpleasant, and prolonged noise.: the fans made an awful din
・Collins Dictionary: A din is a very loud and unpleasant noise that lasts for some time.: They tried to make themselves heard over the din of the crowd. ・Cambridge English Dictionary: a loud, unpleasant confused noise that lasts for a long time: I had to shout to make myself heard above the din.
なるほど、"ding-dong" を連想しましたが、おそらく共通の語源でしょうね。

dreadlocks/dreads

今日取り上げる単語はReader's Digest ３月号の記事 'The Case of the Disqualifying Dreads' に出てきました。
But right before Jones turned to leave CMS's office, Wilson posed a strange question: Did Jones have dreadlocks? Jones, who is black, was wearing dreads--very short ones.
"dreadlocks" の意味を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A hairstyle in which the hair is washed but not combed and twisted while wet into tight braids or ringlets hanging down on all sides.: His thick black hair was kept in long dreadlocks, perfectly framing his face.
・Collins Dictionary: If someone has dreadlocks, their hair is divided into a large number of tight strips, like pieces of rope. Dreadlocks are worn especially by men who are Rastafarians.: He was turned down for a driving job when he refused to cut his dreadlocks.
"dreads" も "dreadlocks" あるいは "A person with dreadlocks."(Oxford)を指しています。
ところで後者の辞書の説明文にある "Rastafarians" の意味も調べます。
・Collins Dictionary: Relating to a religious movement of Jamaican origin holding that blacks are the chosen people, that Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia was the Messiah, and that black people will eventually return to their Africa.
髪型と言えば先日(4/12/2017)も "French twist" 取り上げたのを思い出しました。

chew the fat

今日取り上げるのは以前（11/1/2010）にも取り上げた慣用句で、昨日と同様にReader's Digest ３月号の記事 'Scamming The Scammers' に出てきた "chew the fat" です。
I live in London, so I thought I'd just pop round and give you the $900 in person. Be good to meet up and chew the fat. I stopped by your corporate offices in North London, only I couldn't find an office there. Just a cul-de-sac. What's the deal?
...
Oddly enough, that was the end of our correspondence.
今回は語源が気になったので、語源に触れている次の辞書の説明を引用します。
The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms: Also, chew the rag. Chat in a friendly, leisurely way, as in Let's get together for coffee and chew the fat, or John and Dave spend hours just chewing the rag. Before the 1880s in Britain, chew the fat meant "to grumble or complain," and chew the rag also has been used in this way. Today both expressions are largely synonyms for a friendly talk or gossip session. Why this idiom uses fat and rag is not known, but some speculate that fat refers to juicy items of gossip and rag to ladies' sewing circles and the cloth they worked on while chatting.

fitness tracker

３週間程前から歩数計を使い始めました。Reader's Digest ３月号の記事を読んでいると歩数計を意味しているに違いないという表現が次の様に出てきました。
I've started wearing a fitness tracker to count my daily steps, and the first time I made it to 9,989 steps in one day, I proudly showed the device to my stepson.
"Not bad," he said. "But you'd better keep walking. You're looking at it upside down."
歩数計は "pedometer" という事をガイド資格の試験勉強で十数年前に覚えましたが、この "fitness tracker" も辞書に出ているのか確認します。
"fitness tracker" を掲載している辞書は見つかりませんでしたが、"fitness tracker" からWkikipediaの"activity tracker"の項目に転送され次の説明がありました。
An activity tracker, also known as a fitness tracker, is a device or application for monitoring and tracking fitness-related metrics such as distance walked or run, calorie consumption, and in some cases heartbeat and quality of sleep. The term is now primarily used for smartwatches that are synced, in many cases wirelessly, to a computer or smartphone for long-term data tracking. There are also independent mobile and Facebook apps. Some evidence has found that the use of these type of devices results in less weight loss rather than more.
なるほど、"fitness tracker"/"activity tracker" は歩数計より進歩した "gadget" の事ですね。それなら、一昨年からジョッギングやマラソン（今はフルマラソンは走らないでハーフマラソンと10kmのレースだけなのでマラソンと言うと語弊がありますが）の際にエプソンのWristableGPSを腕に付けて走っていますが、この一般名が "fitness tracker"/"activity tracker" と言うのですね。

go pear-shaped

Reader's Digest ３月号の記事 'Scamming The Scammers' から引用します。
John's having the op today. Just in case things go pear-shaped, he's willed 9.2M to me to spend "as frivolously as possible." Let me know how I can best receive the money? I've run up a sizable water bill that I neet to pay off ASAP.
慣用句らしい "go pear-shaped" の意味を調べます。
・Collins Dictionary: If a situation goes pear-shaped, bad things start happening.: He feared his career had gone a bit pear-shaped.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: If a plan goes pear-shaped, it fails: We'd planned to go away for the weekend, but it all went pear-shaped.
意味は分かりましたがこの言葉の由来が気になります。
多くの語源と同様に次のWikipediaの説明もすっきりしませんが、他に明快な説はないようなのでこれで良しとします。
The OED cites its origin as within the Royal Air Force; as of 2003 the earliest citation there is a quote in the 1983 book Air War South Atlantic. Others date it to the RAF in the 1940s, from pilots attempting to perform aerial manoeuvres such as loops. These are difficult to form perfectly, and are usually noticeably distorted?i.e., pear-shaped.

nary

Emotional First Aidを読んでいます。
The notion that venting our anger produces a cathartic experience that will reduce our rage and improve our psychological state is widespread even among mental health professionals. Decades ago, therapists like the one played by Billy Crystal began advocaing we vent our anger by assaulting benign objects and nary a couch pillow has felt safe ever since.
最後の文に出てきた "nary" の意味を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: informal or dialect form of not: By the time the film was about to begin, nary a chair was left unoccupied.
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: not a single: survived the accident with nary a scratch
語源も調べます。
・Online Etymology Dictionary: 1746, alteration of ne'er a, short for never a.
覚えやすそうな単語ですね。

comeuppance

Emotional First Aidを読んでいます。
Clearly the friend's resentment had been building up over many months and had reached a boiling point. But he hadn't said a word about feeling burdened by my patient's incessant ruminations. Indeed, none of his friends had. The assaultive friend did receive his comeuppance, however, as he spent the next five hours to the emergency room, listening to my patient replay nasal renditons of the breakup while avoiding sprays of bloody gauze from his nose.
今日取り上げる単語は上の文章に出てきた "comeuppance" です。辞書で意味を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A punishment or fate that someone deserves.: By any reasonable moral reckoning he deserves all the comeuppance of his bad faith.
・Collins Dictionary: If you say that someone has got their comeuppance, you approve of the fact that they have been punished or have suffered for something wrong that they have done.: The central character is a bad man who shoots people and gets his comeuppance.
語源も調べます。
・Online Etymology Dictionary: also comeupance, 1859, presumably rooted in verbal phrase come up "present oneself for judgment before a tribunal"
なるほど、"come up" で裁判や調停などで呼び出されて赴く場合にも使われるのですね。
・Collins Dictionary: In law, when a case comes up, it is heard in a court of law.: He is one of the reservists who will plead not guilty when their cases come up.