- 1過街老鼠；被大家排擠、沒人願意靠近的人。字源原指印度種姓裡被賤視的一群人，現在多用來形容人人避之唯恐不及的對象。
A pariah is a person a whole group has turned against. People will not sit with them, will not speak kindly about them, and will try not to be seen with them. This is stronger than unpopular. It says: we have pushed this person outside our circle, and we mean to keep them there. You can use it for one person, and sometimes for a whole group that other groups treat this way. It is a serious word. You will meet it in news and essays more than in chat. Though actually, the word has a heavy past. It first named a people in South India who were kept at the very bottom of the old caste system, so some speakers now treat it with care, or avoid it when they are talking about real groups of people. Used about one person that everyone has shut out, it is still common.
組成Does not split in English. It comes from Tamil பறையர் (paṟaiyar), from பறையன் (paṟaiyaṉ, “drummer”), from பறை (paṟai, “drum”) — or the close Malayalam line പറയർ / പറയൻ / പറ, with the same drummer sense. Parai / para was a large drum used to announce the king’s notices. The people who made a living with that drum were called paraiyar; in the caste system they were placed very low, and the name became an insult. That is how English got pariah. Some writers have also linked it to Sanskrit पर (para, “distant; outsider”), but the Tamil / Malayalam drummer story is the one usually told.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，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。
pariahnoun/pəˈɹaɪə/
- 1
Synonym of outcast: A person despised and excluded by their family, community, or society, especially a member of the untouchable castes in Indian society.
- What is this smoking that it should be considered a crime? I believe in my heart that women are jealous of it, as of a rival. They speak of it as of some secret, awful vice that seizes upon a man, and makes him a Pariah from genteel society.
- I’m a pariah, outlawed from Time Lord society.
- 2
A similarly despised group of people or species of animal.
- As ecological conditions became unfavorable for pig raising, there was no alternative function which could redeem its existence. The creature became not only useless, but worse than useless—harmful, a curse to touch or merely to see—a pariah animal.
- This scenario could lead to war crimes the scale of which has not been seen in Europe since the Nazis — crimes that would make Vladimir Putin, his cronies and Russia as a country all global pariahs.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
- pariah dog
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。