- 1圖騰。最常見的搭配是 totem pole「圖騰柱」，就是北美原住民那種高高的雕刻木柱。中文的「圖騰」現在也被借去講品牌、次文化的象徵符號（例如「某某已成為一種圖騰」），英文的 totem 也有同樣的引申用法。
A totem is an animal, a plant, or sometimes another natural thing that a family, a clan, or a tribe treats as specially connected to them — a kind of spiritual relative or emblem. The idea is strongest in talk about Indigenous peoples of North America: your clan might be the Bear or the Eagle, and that creature stands for who your people are, with stories, respect, and rules attached to it. The word can also mean the or painted figure made of that creature, which is why *totem pole* — the tall cedar post of the Pacific Northwest — is the phrase most meet first.
In wider use, people borrow the word for anything a group treats as its sacred symbol, often with a hint that outsiders find the a bit much: "the company car became a totem of success". *Totem pole* has also drifted into office English, where "low on the totem pole" means low in rank — worth knowing that this use is an outsider's misreading, since the carvings are not really a ranking from top to bottom, and some people find the phrase careless.
A gentle note on respect: these are living traditions, not museum curiosities, so it is best to write about them the way you would want someone writing about your own family's shrine.
組成Borrowed into English from Ojibwe, an Indigenous language of North America — from *(o)doodem*, roughly "his clan, his kin-group". English took it in the 1700s, and it kept the sound rather than being translated, which is common for words describing something the borrowing language had no name for.
同家族的字
- totemicthe adjective, formed from the same borrowed word
原始詞典資料5 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。
totemnoun/ˈtoʊtəm/
- 1
Any natural object or living creature that serves as an emblem of a tribe, clan or family; the representation of such an object or creature.
- 2
The clan whose kinship is defined in reference to such an object or creature.
- The totem members were forbidden to eat the flesh of the totem animal, or were allowed to do so only under specific conditions.
- These meanings flow from bear-like characteristics imprinted on totem members. Members of the bear clan may have dispositional, cognitive, and physical capabilities similar to those of bear.
- 3
A symbol or personification.
- “She became a totem,” he added. “She became the personification of a particular response to the pandemic, which people in the far-flung margins of the internet and the not so far-flung margins used against her.”
- 4
An arbitrarily chosen object serving as a reminder to check whether one is awake or not, to aid in having lucid dreams.
- The best way to determine if you are dreaming or not is to have a totem in your lucid dreams that does not exist in reality. Inducing yourself is as easy as waking up during the night and practicing as you fall back asleep. Say, "I will be aware I am dreaming while I am dreaming by seeing my totem."
- 5
A tall object resembling a totem pole.
- Out the front of the Drive-in rose the town’s main tourist attraction, a totem of signs to bizarre places with impossible distances such as Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and so on.
- There were rumors going around Clapham that he was some sort of wizard. Admittedly, the most striking feature of his estate did not help to dispel those rumors. From a little hillock in the yard, an eighty-foot pole projected into the sky, like a ship’s mast rising from dry land. [...] Despite his eccentric couture and the strange totem rising from his backyard, Henry Cavendish was not a wizard. He was, in eighteenth-century terms, a natural philosopher, or what we now call a scientist.
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。