Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
In humans, IOUs and money are devices that permit delays in the transactions. The parties to the trade don't hand over the goods simultaneously but can hold a debt over to the future, or even trade the debt on to others. As far as I know, no non-human animals in the wild have any direct equivalent of money. But memory of individual identity plays the same role more informally.
Vampire bats learn which other individuals of their social group can be relied upon to pay their debts (in regurgitated blood) and which individuals cheat. Natural selection favours genes that predispose individuals, in relationships of asymmetric need and opportunity, to give when they can, and to solicit giving when they can't.
吸血コウモリが本当に存在するとは知りませんでした。すると "regurgitated blood" の "regurgitate" は血を吸う事と関係があるようですが、辞書で意味を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Bring (swallowed food) up again to the mouth.: gulls regurgitate food for the chicks
・Collins Dictionary: If a person or animal regurgitates food, they bring it back up from their stomach before it has been digested.:[formal] Sometimes he regurgitates the food we give him because he cannot swallow.
"regurgitate" は吸うのではなく戻すのですね。 Vampire batsは二日間血を吸えないと死んでしまうので、その様な場合には仲間に血をねだり、血を分け与えてもらう習性があるとWikipediaに説明がありました。一旦食べた物を戻すとなると、牛などの反芻動物の "ruminate" を直ぐに連想しますが、意味に違いがあるのでしょうか？ "ruminate" の意味も辞書で確認します。
Collins Dictionary: When animals ruminate, they bring food back from their stomach into their mouth and chew it again.
"regurgitate" は単に戻すだけの意味の様ですが、"ruminate" は反芻するために戻すのですね。また "ruminate" には次の意味もあり、
If you ruminate on something, you think about it very carefully.
面白いことに "regurgitate" には次の意味があります。
regurgitate: If you say that someone is regurgitating ideas or facts, you mean that they are repeating them without understanding them properly.
Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
There is a little evidence that religious belief protects people from stress-related diseases. The evidence is not strong, but it would not be surprising if it were true, for the same kind of reason as faith- healing might turn out to work in a few cases. I wish it were not necessary to add that such beneficial effects in no way boost the truth value of religion's claims. In George Bernard Shaw's words, 'The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.'
Reader's Digest 2月号の記事 'Laughter the Best Medicine' からの引用です。
AS THE HEDGE FUND manager gets out of his brand-new Porshe, a truck goes racing by, taking off the door. "My Porshe! My beautiful silver Porshe is ruined!" he screams.
A police officer on the scene shakes his head in disgust. "I can't believe you," he says. "You're so focused on your possessions that you didn't even realize your left arm was torn off when the truck hit you."
The hedge fund manager looks down in absolute horror. "Oh no!" he screams. "My Rolex!"
Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress? Possibly, although the theory must run a gauntlet of sceptics who point out the many circumstances in which religion causes rather than relieves stress. It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. Perhaps it is unfair to single out the Catholics.
かなり昔に "throw down the gauntlet" を調べた時に "gauntlet" は中世の騎士が手に付けている手袋を指し、 "throw down the gauntlet" は挑戦する意味だと知りましたが、上の引用個所にある "run a gauntlet" の意味を推測できません。辞書を見ます。
・Collins Dictionary: to endure an onslaught or ordeal, as of criticism: He knows what it's like, having to run the gauntlet of those people.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: to have to deal with a lot of people who are criticizing or attacking you: Every day they had to run the gauntlet of hostile journalists on their way to school.
・Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary: be attacked or criticized by many people at the same time: The Prime Minister’s car had to run the gauntlet of a large group of protesters outside the conference hall.
"run a gauntlet" の意味は分かりましたが何故 "gauntlet" が使われるのか分かりません。 "run a gauntlet" の由来を調べます。
This phrase alludes to the former military practice of punishing a wrongdoer by forcing him to run between two lines of men armed with sticks, who beat him as he passed.
Gauntlet here has nothing to do with a glove, but is a version of an earlier word gantlope , itself taken from Swedish gatloppe , which meant ‘lane course’.
何故か "stick" を意味する "gantlope" が "glove" を意味する "gauntlet" に置き換わったのですね。
Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor.
文章から "flagellar" は鞭毛の事だと分かりますが、知らなかったので辞書で確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A slender threadlike structure, especially a microscopic appendage that enables many protozoa, bacteria, spermatozoa, etc. to swim.: The single flagellum provides the bacteria with mobility and kinetic activity.
・Collins Dictionary: a long whiplike outgrowth from a cell that acts as an organ of locomotion: occurs in some protozoans, gametes, spores, etc
Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
"history" が差別用語だとして、"herstory" が出てきます。
It was the feminists who raised my consciousness of the power of consciousness-raising. 'Herstory' is obviously ridiculous, if only because the 'his' in 'history' has no etymological connection with the masculine pronoun. It is as etymologically silly as the sacking, in 1999, of a Washington official whose use of 'niggardly' was held to give racial offence. But even daft examples like 'niggardly' or 'herstory' succeed in raising consciousness. Once we have smoothed our philological hackles and stopped laughing, herstory shows us history from a different point of view. Gendered pronouns notoriously are the front line of such consciousness-raising.
"herstory" は初めて目にしますが、辞書に載っている言葉か確認します。
・Oxford English Dictionary: History viewed from a female or specifically feminist perspective.: If this mutilation of women and their bodies continues, what will happen to our future, to our daughters and to our herstory?
・Wiktionary: History that emphasizes the role of women, or that is told from a woman's (or from a feminist) point of view.
確かに載せている辞書もありました。
Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいますが2/25/2012に覚えてその後目にした事のない表現 "Chinese whispers" が次の様に出てきました。
All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus' life. All were then copied and recopied, through many different 'Chinese Whispers generations' (see Chapter 5) by fallible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas.
Richard DawkinsのThe God Delusionを読んでいます。
The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honour to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.
In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not super- natural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance.
SETIはSearch for Extraterrestrial Intelligenceの略で地球外の知的生命体の探査のことです。
私が今日覚えたい単語は "provenance" です。
・Oxford English Dictionary: The beginning of something's existence; something's origin.: they try to understand the whole universe, its provenance and fate
・Collins Dictionary: The provenance of something is the place that it comes from or that it originally came from.[formal] Kato was fully aware of the provenance of these treasures.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the place of origin of something: This raised doubts about the provenance of the painting.
BERTRAND RUSSELLの次の言葉を引用します。
The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.
本音を言わないのには理由があるのですね。
A woman is in an exclusive pet store looking to buy a sweater for her dog. After witnessing much hemming and hawing and the scrutinizing of the size of each item, the salesperson finally pipes in. "Why don't you bring the dog in for a fitting?" he says.
"I can't do that," the customer says. "The sweater is a surprise."
ペットの犬にサプライズプレゼントなんて笑えますね。
ところで "hemming and hawing" の意味が分からないので辞書を見ます。辞書には "hem and haw" の項で説明がありました。
・Oxford English Dictionary: Hesitate; be indecisive.: I waste a lot of time hemming and hawing before going into action.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: to be uncertain and take a long time deciding something: We hemmed and hawed for months before actually deciding to buy the house.
・McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs :to be uncertain about something; to be evasive; to say "ah" and "eh" when speaking—avoiding saying something meaningful. Stop hemming and hawing around. I want an answer.
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