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If someone is cold-hearted, they show no pity when another person is hurting. They can watch someone suffer, or make a hard choice that hurts people, and seem not to feel it. It is a strong word, a little like story-book talk, used to judge a character, not a small . You would not usually reach for it just because someone is quiet or shy. Though actually, a reserved person may still care very much; cold-hearted is about missing kindness, not about missing words. The “cold” is in how they treat others, not in their body. People often set it against warm-hearted.
冷酷的;鐵石心腸
組成cold + heart + -ed: having a cold heart. Old English already had caldheort with the same idea.
同家族的字
- coldthe cold here is lack of feeling, not weather
- heartheart as the place feeling is imagined to live
- warm-heartedthe usual opposite: a warm heart instead of a cold one
- hard-hearteda close cousin: a hard heart also will not be moved
原始詞典資料1 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。
cold-heartedadj
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Without sympathy, feeling or compassion; callous or heartless.
- The songs were sung by every one who possessed so much as an echo of a voice: they were quoted—copied—got by heart—in fact, we cannot imagine how the world of singers went on in the days when ‘Tara’s Hall,’ and ‘The young May Moon,’ and ‘The Meeting of the Waters,’ were strains unborn. And now, after so many changes and casualties have passed over it, when the work is at last brought to a conclusion, when the last tones of the harp have died away, those must be colder-hearted than ourselves who can avoid remembering how many who welcomed the first with eager gladness, are now deaf to the sweet cunning of music for ever!
- Philip was not a spoiled child, I admit. But his parents did their duty by him, as they have done by us all! Our interests have been, through life, their first object; and they have sought no other than domestic pleasures. But even were it otherwise, is a child to calculate its filial duty as though the mere repayment of a debt?—Dearest Mrs. Saville,—Philip is colder-hearted than a stone!
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。