1. What does the Rx on doctor's prescriptions mean? Two things about prescriptions(处方) haven't changed since your great-grandparent's day: the handwriting is almost impossible to read and there's always that mysterious "Rx" at the top. We don't know why doctors are unable to master penmanship (书法)after all those years of education. But we do know something about that cryptic( 神秘的)Rx. There are two schools of thought. One has it that Rx is short for the Latin word for recipe, since druggists used to make medicines from raw ingredients(成分). The other answer is that Rx was a corruption(讹误) either of the astrological( 占星的)sign for Jupiter of the sign for the ancient Egyptian god Horus, calling on those gods for healing. Now if there was only an ancient god for penmanship.
2. Why is the abbreviation for pound "lb.?" If everything in the world were logical, this abbreviation would probably be "po." or "pd." But then "post office" and "paid" would have to find new abbreviations. Actually, the abbreviation "lb." for pound isn't illogical, it just isn't English. In ancient Rome, things were measured or weighed against standardized units. To weigh something, you put it in a pan on a balancing scale(天平) and placed objects called "pondos" (from which we get the word "pounds") in the other pan until everything balanced. The abbreviation "lb." comes not from the pondos used to calculate the weight, but from the scale itself. The scale's Latin name is "libra", easily abbreviated "lb".
3. Why is kidding someone "pulling their leg?" The expression originated a hundred years ago in Scotland, where it had the harsher(生硬的 )meaning of making a complete fool of someone. The connection to pulling a person's leg is that it would throw them off balance and trip them up, making them look bumbling(装模作样的), awkward, and foolish. Over time the meaning softened, becoming more good-natured. But don't do it too much to anyone or, as another saying goes, you could leave them without a leg to stand on.
4. Where do we get the expression, "go to town?" In the nineteenth century, most people lived in the country. They went to town to have fun, get some culture, maybe take care of business, go to church, socialize, or go shopping. It's what many of them did right after their once-a-week bath. So the expression "go to town" came to mean something special, done in a big way, with lots of enthusiasm and excitement, pulling out all the stops and sparing no expense.
5. Where do we get the expression, "dead as a doornail?" In the past you didn't push anything to announce yourself: you pounded(敲打). Doors back then were thick and visitors used a knocker (门环)to bang on a metal plate on the door to get attention. Doornails held this target in place. If you were popular and had a lot of callers--hopefully not all bill collectors--the doornails would take their share of abuse(滥用). Eventually they got pretty mashed(磨坏的), giving rise to the expression, "dead as a . . ." Well, you know.
6. Why are those computer users called "hackers"? Use of the word "hacker"(黑客)to describe a computer programmer (程序员)comes from the sports world, where it means "an athlete who enthusiastically pursues a sport." Though most people use the word in reference to programmers who wreak(发泄) technical havoc(大破坏) or gain illegal entry to computer systems, now it refers to anyone with an understanding of computers can be called hacker. "Cracker(解密高手)," they say, is the correct word for malicious (怀恶意的)programmers.
7. Why is a dismissed employee said to be "sacked"? In the 17th century, craftsmen and artisans(工匠) brought their own tools to work, storing them in a sack. If the boss wanted to dismiss one of these workers, he would often give him his sack. The implication being that he should put his tools in the sack and leave the shop. Today, you don't have to be an artisan or a craftsman to "get the sack." Even the boss can be "sacked."
8. What does S O S stand for? Believe it or not, S O S, the international distress(遇难) signal, doesn't stand for anything. Some people think that it stands for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls," but it's just not true. Those famous three letters don't stand for a thing. In fact, they were only chosen to indicate distress because they're easy to communicate in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, three dots.
9.Why do we bother to abbreviate "at" with @? Email has made a celebrity(出名) out of this little symbol that looks like an "a" figure skating. But why abbreviate something as short as "at?" Blame the medieval(中世纪) monks(道士). Inscribing(写) everything by hand on scarce parchment(羊皮纸), they took every short cut they could. But long after words like "ye" got dumped(倒) into the linguistic(语言学的) dustbin, @ just kept on going. Its continued existence was insured when several early typewriter manufacturers trying to impress commercial clients, added it as a shift-key character. Then, in 1971, when a programmer needed a character to separate names from addresses on early email, there it was.
10.Why do we call police officers cops or coppers? Cop comes from the Latin, capere, meaning "to take". Cop, which entered English in the Middle Ages, meant to grab, capture, or snatch something. A criminal can "cop" (swipe, steal) an object from a store, and the police can also grab, or cop him. This is also how we get the phrase, "to cop a plea," to avoid a long sentence by taking advantage, or grabbing at, the chance to plead guilty to a lesser offense.
11.How did that military vehicle get to be called a tank? Did you ever stop to think of how strange it is that we call that formidable fighting machine on treads, with its canon, machine guns and armor, a "tank," as if it were filled with water? That's an amazingly benign name for such a powerful weapon. As it turns out, the name was meant to sound incongruous( 不协调的)with the thing itself. It was used by the British as a code name for their new armored vehicles in World War I. They wanted to preserve the element of surprise, and so they referred to it by this innocuous(无害的) name, which surprisingly took hold and has lasted through the present.
