Positioning: The Battle for Your Mindを読んでいると次の文が出てきました。
Shakespear was wrong. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. Not only do you see what you want to see, you also smell what you want to smell. Which is why the single most important decision in the marketing of perfume is the name you decide to put on the brand.
文学とビジネスはやはり相容れないものなのですね。
Reader's Digest 11月号の記事 "Who They Really Are" で米国大統領候補のトランプとヒラリーについて、二人がどのような人物かの特集がありました。まずはトランプについてのコメントです。
In New York, Andrew Sullivan wrote: Those who believe that Trump's ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic.
"thug" は確か悪党と覚えていますが、どうでしょうか？
・Collins Dictionary: If you describe a person or their behaviour as thuggish, you mean they behave in a violent, rough, or threatening way.: The owner of the stall, a large, thuggish man, grabbed Dai by the collar.
・Dictionary.com: Of or pertaining to thuggery. Their thuggish manner made continuing negotiations very difficult.
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。
Reader's Digest １１月号の記事 "Secrets the FBI May Not Want You to Know" から引用します。
Jucy factoid from inside the nation's most private agency
Even if you've never been arrested, your fingerprints are probably on file. If you've had your prints taken as part of a backgound check, they likely live in the FBI's Next Generation Identification system, a database of more than 77 million prints.
"Jucy factoid" とは何でしょうか？ 辞書には "jucy factoid" の項目は見当たらなかったのでそれぞれの単語の意味を調べます。
juicy:
・Oxford English Dictionary: Interestingly scandalous.: juicy gossip: The media is interested in content that will appeal to their readers, which should preferably be juicy.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: used to describe information that is especially interesting because it is shocking or personal: I've got some really juicy gossip for you.
次に "factoid" をチェックします。
・Oxford English Dictionary: An assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.: When does a piece of data go from being a factoid to being a fact?
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: a) an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print b) a briefly stated and usually trivial fact: The book is really just a collection of interesting factoids.
考えてみれば "factoid" の接尾辞 "oid" は "android" の接尾辞 "oid" と同じですね。
今年は年初からインフルエンザにかかり、ほとんどベッドで寝ているか、たまにＴＶを見るだけの正月休みでした。まだ少し咳が出ますが、今日からから出勤し、ブログも再開する予定です。 ＴＶドラマを幾つも見たので、Reader's Digest 10月号に出ていた次の言葉を思い出しました。 POINT: "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
確かに現代のドラマで現実離れしている場面を見るとドラマが嘘っぽく感じる時がありますね。
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