核心畫面
You can picture an old story that a whole people tells and re-tells — gods, monsters, how the sun got into the sky. Nobody checks it against evidence; it is carried because everyone carries it. That is the shape of the word: a story that lives by being passed along, not by being verified.
可以想成一則被整個族群一代一代講下去的老故事：神明、怪物、太陽是怎麼掛上天空的。沒有人去查證它，它靠的是「大家都這麼…更多收起
可以想成一則被整個族群一代一代講下去的老故事：神明、怪物、太陽是怎麼掛上天空的。沒有人去查證它，它靠的是「大家都這麼說」而流傳下來。這個字的畫面比較像——一個靠口耳相傳活著、而不是靠證據活著的說法。原始詞典資料6 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。
mythnoun/mɪθ/
- 1
A traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are personified; a sacred narrative regarding a god, a hero, the origin of the world or of a people, etc.
- Jacobsen's theory about the empty storehouse is still valid, for a myth never has one meaning only; a myth is a polyphonic fugue of many voices.
- 2
Such stories as a genre.
- Myth was the product of man's emotion and imagination, acted upon by his surroundings. (E. Clodd, Myths & Dreams (1885), 7, cited after OED)
- 3
A commonly-held but false belief, a common misconception; a fictitious or imaginary person or thing; a popular conception about a real person or event which exaggerates or idealizes reality.
- Okay, okay, okay… First, of course, babies feel pain. How the fuck did we ever think otherwise⁉ But more importantly, the fact that painkillers are addictive was not a myth. It’s like a book of Greek mythology featuring the stories of Zeus, Sisyphus, Oedipus and Yanni. Come on! That last one is very real and it cannot be dismissed.
- Scientists debunk the myth that gum stays in the human stomach for seven years.
- 4
A person or thing held in excessive or quasi-religious awe or admiration based on popular legend
- Father Flanagan was legendary, his institution an American myth. (Tucson (Arizona) Citizen, 20 September 1979, 5A/3, cited after OED)
- 5
A person or thing existing only in imagination, or whose actual existence is not verifiable.
- As for Mrs. Primmins's bones, they had been myths these twenty years.
- Living beyond the Omega-4 mass relay in the Terminus Systems, the mysterious Collector species is glimpsed so rarely as to be taken for a myth by most in galactic society. In reality, Collectors are human-sized insectoid bipeds and can resemble massive winged beetles. They are a terrifying force in the galaxy, responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands.
- 6
An invented story, theory, or concept.
- His story is a pure myth.
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。