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Flashman is a character in the nineteenth-century novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He is an older boy at a British boarding school who bullies the younger boys: he is cruel, he takes what he wants, and he likes to see them afraid. Writers later used the name as a quick way to point to that kind of school bully — loud with people he can hurt, and not brave when someone equal stands up to him. Though actually, many readers today know the name from later adventure books that take the same Flashman and send him around the world as a charming coward; those books start from this bully, but the first home of the character is the school story. It is a name, so we keep the capital F. You meet it in literature, not in street talk.
《湯姆布朗的求學時代》裡的惡霸角色 Flashman
原始詞典資料4 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。
flashmannoun
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A slick salesman or spin doctor.
- A flashman just naturally tried to promote and show- off his company at every opportunity. Wasn't that what sales-PR was all about? Even the police departments engaged flashmen.
- "They're all Los Angeles flashmen running this thing. Joe McDonald told anyone who'd listen that they're just a bunch of sleazebags opposed to everything we stand for, dragging show biz into it, and he was right."
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obsoleteA pimp.
- Are not your favourite friends horn-boys and flashmen —
- While loud her flashman cries, 'Arise, my ladybird, arise!'
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obsoleteA woman's boyfriend.
- Her flashman, in her estimation, is ten times handsomer, certainly more acceptable.
- c. 1833, Broadside Ballad, "My flashman has gone to sea". My flashman he's a Yankee, with his hair cut short behind
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obsoleteSomeone who distracts the target of a thief; a confidence trickster.
- "Stop your jaw, or I'll stop it for you, and teach you another time to know a gentleman from a flashman."
- By not knowing it: the fellow's manners are so plausible and even insinuating, his appearance so gentlemanly, his voice so winning, that I suffered him to cheat me at Newmarket in the sale of a spavined horse, a regular screw, on the strength of which he claimed my acquaintance ; but as soon as I twigged that he was a flashman — one of the swell mob, I mizzled — gave him the cut direct.
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。