1. 1胡鬧、打鬧、瞎搞(語氣輕,帶點好笑,不是真的在罵人)

    Tomfoolery is silly, playful behaviour — messing about, joking around, doing daft things when you should be getting on with something. It is a gentle word. When a teacher says 'that's enough tomfoolery', they are telling children to settle down, but they are not really angry; the word itself half-admits the fun. That is why you hear it most from older speakers, from teachers, and in a slightly performed, old-fashioned voice. Younger people would more likely say 'messing around' or 'goofing around'. The tone matters more than the meaning here: tomfoolery is never cruel and never serious . If someone breaks a window on purpose, that is not tomfoolery. If they were chasing each other round the room and a window happened to break, that was tomfoolery — and the word is doing quiet work, making it sound . The old noun 'a tomfool' (a stupid person) still exists but you rarely meet it now.

組成Tom(泛指『一般人、某某人』,來自人名 Thomas)+ foolery(傻事、胡鬧). English used 'Tom' the way Chinese uses 某某 — for any ordinary man. A 'Tom fool' was that ordinary man being an idiot.

同家族的字

  • foolthe root of foolery — a silly person
  • foolishsame fool, made into an adjective
  • tomboysame generic Tom meaning 'boy/male'
  • tomcatsame generic Tom, applied to a male cat

原始詞典資料2 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。

tomfoolerynoun/ˌtɒmˈfuːlə.ɹi/

  • 1

    Foolish behaviour or speech.

    • "Do not think THAT," I put in. "It was not so at all. I grant you that my behaviour was bad—I fully confess that it was so, and make no secret of the fact. I would even go so far as to grant you that my behaviour might well be called stupid and indecent tomfoolery; but, MORE than that it was not.
  • 2

    slangJewellery.

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。