- 1大屠殺；戰火或慘案裡的大量死傷
Carnage is what you call it when a great many people are killed or badly hurt in one stretch of violence, especially in war, a bombing, or a massacre. The word puts the bodies in the front of the picture: not “a battle happened,” but “look how much flesh was destroyed.” News writers and history books like it; it feels serious and a little old-and-formal, not a word you toss around at dinner. Though actually, people do stretch it. A commentator may call a brutal football match “carnage,” and a headline may call a messy sale “carnage,” meaning chaos and wreckage, not true killing. That looser use is common, but it is still a dark joke sitting on a grave word. Older still, the idea was the slaughter of animals for meat — flesh as food — before it became flesh as the cost of war.
From the word’s history
Borrowed from Middle French carnage, from Old French charnage or Vulgar Latin *carnaticum, from Latin caro 'flesh'.
借自中古法文 carnage，源自拉丁文 caro「肉」。
組成From Middle French carnage. That sits on Old French charnage, from char, “flesh,” or on Vulgar Latin *carnaticum, “the slaughter of animals,” from Latin caro, carnem, “flesh.” By the look of the English word: Latin carn- (flesh) + -age (the act or the result).
同家族的字
- carnalsame Latin carn- for flesh
- carnivalsame flesh-piece: the old ‘goodbye to meat’ before Lent
- incarnationsame Latin flesh-piece: ‘into flesh’
- carnivoroussame flesh-piece plus a piece meaning ‘eat’
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
carnagenoun/ˈkɑː.nɪdʒ/
- 1
Death and destruction.
- There was carnage after the school play ended with 96 deaths.
- Unleash the wolves / Carnage has no rules / Comparison, competition / We'll bury one and all, all
- 2
The corpses, gore, etc. that remain after a massacre.
- 3
hobbieslifestylesportsAny great loss by a team; a game in which one team wins overwhelmingly.
- The game against Sri Lanka and Australia was carnage with Australia winning by 287 runs.
- 4
slangA heavy drinking binge and its aftermath.
- The lads had recently returned from a wild summer on the party island of Ibiza, an increasingly popular hotspot for working-class British youth. But this was not a scene of drunken holiday carnage in tacky discos.
- Within three hours we'd drunk the place dry. Miraculously, we all made it back on the bus, but I've never seen a more bacchanalian scene of wanton debauchery than the ride back to the hotel. It was total carnage.
- 5
slangAny chaotic situation.
- Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。