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In this sense, chinless does not mean a person has no chin. In British English, especially older, , or newspaper English, it means they have no backbone: they will not stand up for anything, and they fold as soon as life gets hard. The picture behind it is an old class joke. People used to mock young men with weak, receding chins as soft, spoiled, and useless when something needed doing. The set phrase is a chinless wonder. So the word is not only “scared”; it is , a bit wet, and it often carries a class sting. You will hear it far more in Britain than in the United States. It is informal, a little old-fashioned, and if you aim it at a real person. Though actually, a few people still use chinless almost literally for a very small chin — that is a different, physical reading, not this one.
沒骨氣的(英式口語,常帶嘲諷;不是在說下巴)
組成chin(下巴)+ -less(沒有)。這個「沒勇氣」的意思,是從「下巴短、看起來軟弱」的舊嘲笑轉過來的。
同家族的字
- chinthe body part; the old joke treated a weak chin as a weak person
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,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。
chinlessadj
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Without a (pronounced) chin.
- 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Three, Chapter 1, http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent.
- 'Flook' by Trog': note the classic representation of the chinless wonder and the chinful wonderess.
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Having a weak or indecisive character; ineffectual or dim-witted.
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。