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A gaffe is a mistake that makes you look in front of other people — not a wrong answer in maths, but a social one. You say the wrong name, you mention bad news at a party, a politician thanks the wrong town. The room goes quiet; that silence is the gaffe. Newspapers love the word for public figures. It is a little more formal than blunder or mess-up, and it almost always lives in manners, speech, or reading the room, not in breaking a machine. One gaffe can follow a person for years if cameras were running. Though actually, among friends we more often just say 'I put my foot in it.'
失言、出糗
組成From French gaffe, 'a blunder'. It is a doublet of gaff: same older word, different path into English.
同家族的字
- gaffgaffe and gaff are doublets from French; today gaff is usually a hook, or other slang, not this social mistake
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。
gaffenoun/ɡæf/
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A foolish and embarrassing error, especially one made in public; a social blunder; a breach of etiquette.
- make a gaffe
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。