My wife and I used to sit on this bench together for 51 years

Reader's　Digest 9月号の記事 "Life in these United States" からの引用です。

I often took walks along New York City's East River on early summer mornings. Every day, I'd see the same older man sitting on the same bench, gazing wistfully out onto the water. One morning, I decided to talk to him. "Hellow," I said, "I don't mean to bother you, but I see you here every day."
"Is that right?" he said.
"I was curious why you sit on this same bench?"
He turned away with a deep sigh. "My wife and I used to sit on this bench together for 51 years."
"Oh," I said, feeling badly. "I'm sorry."
"And for some bizarre reason she likes to sit over there now," he said, gesturing toward a woman 20 feet to the left of us.

bold

Reader's　Digest 9月号の記事 "Life in these United States" からの引用です。

My husband and I asked our 4-year-old grandson to describe his grandpa. "Bold", he answered. I praised him for such a kind compliment.
Then he held his bangs back at his hairline and asked, "Am I getting bold?"

そう言えば "bold" には二つの意味がありましたね。

palimpsest

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。IS BUSHIDO STILL ALIVE? の章から引用します。

One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are entirely ignorant of our history--"What do we care for heathen records?" some say--and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past. Mocking a nation's history?--as though the career of any people even of the lowest African savages possessing no record--were not a page in the general history of mankind, written by the hand of God Himself. The very lost races are a palimpsest to be deciphered by a seeing eye. To a philosophic and pious mind the races themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race forms a precious page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold!

"palimpsest" を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: an ancient document from which some or all of the original text has been removed and replaced by a new text: a study of the novel as a palimpsest with one textual layer over another
・Collins Dictionary: a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next: Yet another method involved the palimpsest, a manuscript which recycled an older manuscript.

新渡戸稲造は難しい言葉を良く知っていますね。

canonised

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。"THE TRAINING AND POSITION OF WOMAN" の章から引用します。

Girls, when they reached womanhood, were presented with dirks (kai-ken, pocket poniards), which might be directed to the bosom of their assailants, or, if advisable, to their own. The latter was very often the case; and yet I will not judge them severely. Even the Christian conscience with its horror of self-immolation, will not be harsh with them, seeing Pelagia and Dominina, two suicides, were canonised for their purity and piety. When a Japanese Virginia saw her chastity menaced, she did not wait for her father's dagger. Her own weapon lay always in her bosom. It was a disgrace to her not to know the proper way in which she had to perpetrate self-destruction. For example, little as she was taught in anatomy, she must know the exact spot to cut in her throat; she must know how to tie her lower limbs together with a belt so that, whatever the agonies of death might be, her corpse be found in utmost modesty with the limbs properly composed.

"canonised" の意味を調べます。

・Collins Dictionary: If a dead person is canonized, it is officially announced by the Catholic Church that he or she is a saint.; to regard as holy or as a saint：Joan of Arc was finally canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: to praise and admire someone very much, especially in a way that is too much or that they do not deserve: The rebel leader was canonized by left-wingers in the late 1960s.

今日はIIST（旧貿易研修センター） 8期生の同期会が昼にあるので会社を休みます。メンバーの大半が70代なので最近は昼間の開催です。

penury

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。

Chivalry is uneconomical: it boasts of penury. It says with Ventidius that "ambition, the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him." Don Quixote takes more pride in his rusty spear and skin-and-bone horse than in gold and lands, and a samurai is in hearty sympathy with his exaggerated confrère of La Mancha. He disdains money itself,--the art of making or hoarding it. It was to him veritably filthy lucre. The hackneyed expression to describe the decadence of an age was "that the civilians loved money and the soldiers feared death." Niggardliness of gold and of life excited as much disapprobation as their lavish use was panegyrised. "Less than all things," says a current precept, "men must grudge money: it is by riches that

難しい単語が二つ、"penury" と "panegyrised" 出てきました。最初に "penury" を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: the state of being very poor: He died in penury.
・Collins Dictionary: Penury is the state of being extremely poor.: [formal] He was brought up in penury, without education.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the state of being extremely poor: Facing penury he retired to a room over the garage, wrote twelve hours a day for five weeks, and rejoined the middle classes.

この単語 "penury" は覚えたい。

"panegyrised" は英国のつづりなので米国つづりの "panegyrize" で辞書を見ます。

・Wiktionary: o praise, especially in an eloquent speech or in writing.: Whenever a public question comes to such a crisis that the opportunities for individual intervention are reduced to the smallest possible compass, Mr. Roebuck is sure to step in with a formula, summing up the case with indignant brevity, censuring somebody, or panegyrizing somebody.
・Dictionary.com: to indulge in panegyric; bestow praises.: Of course he would have found it hard to panegyrize his favourite democracies when he came to the Hellenistic age.

この "panegyrised" に出会うことは何年も後でしょうね。当然忘れています。

equivocation

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。VERACITY OR TRUTHFULNESSの章から引用します。

Lying or equivocation were deemed equally cowardly. The bushi held that his high social position demanded a loftier standard of veracity than that of the tradesman and peasant. Bushi no ichi-gon—the word of a samurai or in exact German equivalent ein Ritterwort—was sufficient guaranty of the truthfulness of an assertion.

"equivocation" の意味は "lying" と同類項のようですが、辞書で確認します。

・Oxford English Dictionary: a way of behaving or speaking that is not clear or definite and is intended to avoid or hide the truth: These actions must be condemned without equivocation.
・Collins Dictionary: the use of equivocal or ambiguous expressions, esp. in order to mislead or hedge; prevarication: There was no equivocation in his stare; no attempt to pretend he was looking elsewhere.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: to speak in a way that is intentionally not clear and confusing to other people, especially to hide the truth: She accused the minister of equivocating, claiming that he had deliberately avoided telling the public how bad the problem really was.

嘘をついてはないが、言い逃れもしくはとぼけている様子ですね。

mailed

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。BENEVOLENCE, THE FEELING OF DISTRESSの章から引用します。

His master, undaunted by the crude sentiment, continued to encourage the youth, until one day the music of his soul was awakened to respond to the sweet notes of the uguisu, and he wrote
Stands the warrior, mailed and strong,
To hear the uguisu’s song,
Warbled sweet the trees among.”

"mailed" の "mail" は日本語にもなっているメールの意味ではなく、以前にも取り上げた記憶はありますが、意味が思いだせません。 "mail" の意味を辞書で確認します。

・Collins Dictionary: (verb) to cover or protect with or as with mail; (noun) flexible body armor made of small, overlapping metal rings, loops of chain, or scales

前回（11/22/2013）は "mailed fist" の表現に会った時に "mail" の意味を調べていました。

inure

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。COURAGE, THE SPIRIT OF DARING AND BEARINGの章から引用します。

Parents, with sternness sometimes verging on cruelty, set their children to tasks that called forth all the pluck that was in them. “Bears hurl their cubs down the gorge,” they said. Samurai’s sons were let down the steep valleys of hardship, and spurred to Sisyphus-like tasks. Occasional deprivation of food or exposure to cold, was considered a highly efficacious test for inuring them to endurance. Children of tender age were sent among utter strangers with some message to deliver, were made to rise before the sun, and before breakfast attend to their reading exercises, walking to their teacher with bare feet in the cold of winter; they frequently—once or twice a month, as on the festival of a god of learning,-—came together in small groups and passed the night without sleep, in reading aloud by turns.

"inure" は以前契約書をよく読む機会があった時に「効力を生じる」意味で使われていたことを思い出しましたが、上記の例での意味を確認します。

・Oxford English Dictionary: (formal) to make somebody/yourself get used to something unpleasant so that they/you are no longer strongly affected by it: The prisoners quickly became inured to the harsh conditions.
・Collins Dictionary: (usually fol. by to) to accustom to hardship, difficulty, pain, etc.; toughen or harden; habituate: inured to cold

困難な事などに慣れさせる意味で使われるのですね。私が知っていたのは (esp of a law, etc) to come into operation; take effectの用法の方でした。

solipsism

新渡戸稲造の武士道を読んでいます。SOURCES OF BUSHIDOの章から引用します。

I am inclined to think that the Japanese mind, as expressed in the simple tenets of the Shinto religion, was particularly open to the reception of Yang Ming’s precepts. He carried his doctrine of the infallibility of conscience to extreme transcendentalism, attributing to it the faculty to perceive, not only the distinction between right and wrong, but also the nature of psychical facts and physical phenomena. He went as far as, if not farther than, Berkeley and Fichte, in Idealism, denying the existence of things outside of human ken. If his system had all the logical errors charged to Solipsism, it had all the efficacy of strong conviction and its moral import in developing individuality of character and equanimity of temper cannot be gainsaid.

"Solipsism" を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: the theory that only the self exists or can be known:
・Collins Dictionary: the extreme form of scepticism which denies the possibility of any knowledge other than of one's own existence: Idealistic pluralism rejects the idea of solipsism, which would be an idealistic monism.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: the belief that only your own experiences and existence can be known: But lesbianism, at the time, was usually viewed as a kind of narcissistic solipsism, and this weakened its subversive force.

opprobrium

Okakura Kakuzoの "The Book of Tea" を読み終えたので、今度は新渡戸稲造の武士道を読み始めました。今日引用する文は "Bushido" のBUSHIDO AS AN ETHICAL SYSTEMの章からです。

If fighting in itself, be it offensive or defensive, is, as Quakers rightly testify, brutal and wrong, we can still say with Lessing, “We know from what failings our virtue springs.” “Sneaks” and “cowards” are epithets of the worst opprobrium to healthy, simple natures. Childhood begins life with these notions, and knighthood also; but, as life grows larger and its relations many-sided, the early faith seeks sanction from higher authority and more rational sources for its own justification, satisfaction and development. If military interests had operated alone, without higher moral support, how far short of chivalry would the ideal of knighthood have fallen! In Europe, Christianity, interpreted with concessions convenient to chivalry, infused it nevertheless with spiritual data. “Religion, war and glory were the three souls of a perfect Christian knight,” says Lamartine.

明治の人らしく難しい英語を使います。 "opprobrium" の意味を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: severe criticism of a person, country, etc. by a large group of people: The bombing has attracted international opprobrium.
・Collins Dictionary: Opprobrium is open criticism or disapproval of something that someone has done.: [formal] His political opinions have attracted the opprobrium of the Left.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: severe criticism and blame: International opprobrium has been heaped on the country following its attack on its neighbours.

辞書の例文は最近のイスラエルによるガザへの攻撃を思い起させますね。