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A boy who is nearly a man — say fifteen to twenty, past childhood but not yet grown into his full size or strength. The word carries a picture with it: thin, long-limbed, a bit unfinished. It is only ever used of males. This is an old, literary word. You meet it in the Bible, in old novels, in a grandfather's storytelling voice — not in ordinary conversation. When someone does use it today, it is usually one of two moves. Either they mean 'he was too young and slight for what he was facing' — 'a mere stripling, and he stood up to them'. Or they are joking, teasing an older man by calling him a boy: 'listen to this stripling telling us how to run the country' about a forty-year-old minister. The teasing use is common in British newspapers. Because it is old and only applies to boys, there is no matching word for girls in normal use — 'lass' or 'girl' is what people fall back on.
少年、毛頭小子(帶點「還沒長開」「乳臭未乾」的味道)
組成From Middle English stripling. It probably comes from strip in the old sense of something stripped thin — a young man being long and narrow, not yet filled out — plus the ending -ling, which makes small things: duckling (a small duck), sapling (a small tree), gosling, nestling. Scholars mark the strip- part as likely rather than certain.
原始詞典資料3 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。
Striplingname
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A surname.
striplingnoun/ˈstɹɪplɪŋ/
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datedA young man in the state of adolescence, or just passing from boyhood to manhood; a lad. .
- And the king ſaid, Enquire thou whoſe ſonne the ſtripling is.
- And now, I suppose, my Striplings are formally clad, and togated, newly arrived at the Vniversities
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agriculturebusinesshorticultureA seedling with most of the leaves stripped off.
- For there upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediæval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs.
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。