英語四六級詞匯復習技巧：8天攻克8000詞匯(六)

　　BUDGET: just a little bag

　　French merchants of the Middle Ages carried their money around in a bougette, or “l(fā)ittle bag”, a word that descended from the Latin bulga, “a leather bag”. The English word bulge comes from the same source. Belly is a very distant relative too, although that’s not so obvious, but they all have the idea of “swelling” in them. When a storekeeper made up his budget in those days he opened his bag to find out his resources and counted the cash..

　　BUTCHER: slaughtered the goats

　　The original occupation of the butcher seems to have been the slaying of he-goats. Our word comes from the early French bocher, “butcher”, derived from boc, “goat”, An old French ordinance states that the bocher “shall not cast the blood of goats in public ways, nor slaughter the goats in the streets.” In olden times the butcher was of the very elite of tradesmen, as is evidenced by a 14th-century writer who reports: ”A woman that was queen of Fraunce by eritage wedded a bocher for his fairness.”

　　CALCULATE: suggests pebbles

　　When a shopkeeper calculates his accounts, he is apt to use an adding machine. But in Rome 2,000 years ago the merchant figured his profit and loss in a more primitive way. He used what he called calcui, or “l(fā)ittle stones” as his counters. So the Latin term calculus, “pebble”, not only gave us our word calculus which we apply to one of most complicated forms of modern mathematics.

　　CANCEL: a lattice of ink

　　The word for “l(fā)attice” in Latin is cancelli. In a business sense, when a clerk in the Post Office “cancels” a stamp, he makes a lattice of ink marks right across it. Cancel is from the same source as the chancel of a church-originally the lattice division that separated the choir from the nave-now the part of the church so separated. And the word cancellarius, “usher of the law court,” who was so named because he stood ad cancellos, “at the lattice.”

　　CAPITAL: from the human head

　　The word capital in the sense of wealth comes ultimately from the Latin caput , “head”. The Latin root of caput appears in scores of English words in various forms depending upon whether it came to us through the French or directly from the Latin. Both of our words capital and cattle, for example, are from caput, for in the earliest days a man’s wealth, or capital, was reckoned in cattle, and we still speak of a herd of a thousand “head”. A chattel mortgage is really a “cattle” mortgage, and up to the 16th century the English spoke of “goods and cattals” instead of “goods and chattels”.

　　CHARGE: from a Roman chariot

　　When you charge a customer for a purchase you owe a debt to Rome for the term you are using. The Latin word for the four-wheeled baggage wagon that Julius Caesar used in his campaigns was carrus. In later Latin carrus developed the verb. Carricare which meant“to load on a wagon，”and the French took this over as chargier. A “charge account,” of course, “l(fā)oads” a person with the obligation of paying. We charge, or burden a man with his crime. You charge or “l(fā)oad” your mind with a responsibility. And in the olden days, they used to charge a musket with powder and sot. They “l(fā)oaded” it and when they discharged it they “unloaded” it. Beyond this the Roman chariot carrus gave other words. Our car came up through the North French word carre, and the carriage we used to ride in came through the Old Norman French cariage. Cargo is another great-grandchild of carricare, ‘to load.” Cargo is “ loaded” on a cart. But most curiously of all we inherit the word caricature from carricare which sometimes meant to “over-load” and so o exaggerate, as caricaturists are supposed to do.

　　CHAUFFEUR: stoked the fire

　　A French word that used merely to mean a fireman or stoker and that eventually goes back to the Latin calificare, “to make hot.” Around the year 1900, in the first days of the automobile when it often was a steam-driven vehicle, the French gave the bantering name of chauffeur of “stoker” to the professional who drove the car. The term chauffeur derives from chauffer, “to heat,” and this contributed another word to English. The Old French form chaufer went into English as chaufen, “to warm,” which finally changed into our present word chafe which used to mean “to make warm by rubbing,” but now is most commonly used by us in the sense of making the skin sore or sensitive by rubbing. The chafing-dish is the only modern use that retains the original meaning of “heat.” And the chauffeur is no longer a “fireman.”