onyxyoudaoicibaDictYouDict[onyx 词源字典]
onyx: [13] Greek ónux meant ‘claw, fingernail’ (it is distantly related to English nail). Certain sorts of onyx are pink with white streaks, and a resemblance to pink fingernails with their paler crescent-shaped mark at the base led the Greeks to name the stone ónux. The word travelled to English via Latin onyx and Old French onix.
=> nail[onyx etymology, onyx origin, 英语词源]
quellyoudaoicibaDictYouDict
quell: [OE] Quell and kill are probably closely related – indeed, in Old and Middle English quell was used for ‘kill’ (‘birds and small beasts with his bow he quells’, William of Palerne 1350). Quell goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *kwaljan (source also of German quälen ‘torture’), which may have had a variant *kuljan, that could have produced English kill. The milder modern sense of quell developed in the 14th century.
impale (v.)youdaoicibaDictYouDict
1520s, "to enclose with stakes, fence in," from Middle French empaler and directly from Medieval Latin impalare "to push onto a stake," from assimilated form of in- "into, in" (see in- (2)) + Latin palus "a stake, prop, stay; wooden post, pole," from PIE *pak-slo-, from root *pag-/*pak- "to fasten" (see pact). Sense of "pierce with a pointed stake" (as torture or punishment) first recorded 1610s. Related: Impaled; impaling.
impalement (n.)youdaoicibaDictYouDict
1590s, from French empalement, from empaler (see impale).
son of a bitchyoudaoicibaDictYouDict
1707 as a direct phrase, but implied much earlier, and Old Norse had bikkju-sonr. Abbreviated form SOB from 1918; form sumbitch attested in writing by 1969.
Abide þou þef malicious!
Biche-sone þou drawest amis
þou schalt abigge it ywis!
["Of Arthour & of Merlin," c. 1330]
"Probably the most common American vulgarity from about the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth" [Rawson].
Our maid-of-all-work in that department [indecency] is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks of a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. [H.L. Mencken, "The American Language," 4th ed., 1936, p.317-8]
Elsewhere, complaining of the tepidity of the American vocabulary of profanity, Mencken writes that the toned-down form son-of-a-gun "is so lacking in punch that the Italians among us have borrowed it as a satirical name for an American: la sanemagogna is what they call him, and by it they indicate their contempt for his backwardness in the art that is one of their great glories."
It was in 1934 also that the New York Daily News, with commendable frankness, in reporting a hearing in Washington at which Senator Huey P. Long featured, forsook the old-time dashes and abbreviations and printed the complete epithet "son of a bitch." [Stanley Walker, "City Editor," 1934]
Pel's fishing owlyoudaoicibaDictYouDict
"A large fishing owl, Scotopelia peli, with rufous plumage, darker in the upperparts and paler, with slight streaks, in the underparts, found in parts of sub-Saharan Africa", 1950s; earliest use found in David Bannerman (b. 1886). From the genitive of the name of Hendrik Severinus Pel, Dutch colonial official on the Gold Coast (now Ghana), 1840–50, and zoological collector) + fishing owl.