- 1代罪羔羊（口語也常說「替罪羊」）
A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for a bad thing that happened, even when it was not their fault — or not mostly their fault. Groups often pick one person, one team, or even one country to carry the anger, so everyone else can feel cleaner. You hear it at school, at work, and in the news. It is also a verb: to scapegoat someone is to push that blame onto them. The picture is old and quite literal. In 1530 the Bible translator William Tyndale made the English word from scape (an old short form of escape) and goat, for a goat sent away into the wild as if it took the people's wrongs with it. He was reading a Hebrew word, azazel. Though actually, scholars still argue about that Hebrew; Tyndale's split into “escaping goat” is one reading, not a settled fact. In ordinary talk now, almost nobody is thinking of a real animal. People do stretch it: anyone who gets criticised after a failure may call themselves a scapegoat, even when they played a real part.
組成scape (old short form of escape) + goat. Coined in 1530 by William Tyndale, reading Hebrew azazel as “the goat that escapes” (from ez, “goat,” and a word taken as “goes away”). That Hebrew is still debated; this English split is his.
同家族的字
- escapescape is an old shortened form of escape — the goat that “gets away”
- scapegracesame scape plus grace; an old word for a rascal who has “escaped” good behaviour
- scapegallowssame scape plus gallows; an old word for someone who deserves hanging but has escaped it
- goatthe second half is the animal; Tyndale built the word on a goat sent away
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。
scapegoatnoun/ˈskeɪpˌɡoʊt/
- 1
In the Mosaic Day of Atonement ritual, a goat symbolically imbued with the sins of the people, and sent out alive into the wilderness while another was sacrificed.
- And Aarõ caſt lottes ouer the .ij. gootes: one lotte for the Lorde, ãd another for a ſcapegoote.
- […]; alluding herein unto the heart of man, and the precious bloud of our Saviour; who was typified indeed by the Goat that was ſlain, and the ſcape Goat in the wilderneſſe;
- 2
Someone unfairly blamed or punished for some failure.
- He is making me a scapegoat for his own poor business decisions and the supply chain disruptions caused by the hurricane!
- The new Secretary of State had been long sick of the perfidy and levity of the First Lord of the Treasury, and began to fear that he might be made a scapegoat to save the old intriguer who, imbecile as he seemed, never wanted dexterity where danger was to be avoided.
scapegoatverb/ˈskeɪpˌɡoʊt/
- 1
To unfairly blame or punish someone for some failure; to make a scapegoat of.
- People tend to fear and then to scapegoat ... groups which seem to them to be fundamentally different from their own.
- They had been used for centuries to justify or rationalize the behavior of that status and conversely to scapegoat and blame some other category of people.
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。