- 1（故意）毀損公物、破壞行為；【法】毀損罪
Vandalism is the act — and the crime — of damaging things on purpose, especially things that belong to everyone: parks, schools, buses, toilets, statues, walls. It is an uncountable noun, so you say ‘a lot of vandalism’ or ‘an act of vandalism’, never ‘a vandalism’ or ‘two vandalisms’. It shows up constantly in news and legal English (‘charged with vandalism’, ‘vandalism costs the city millions’), and in that setting it is the formal name for the offence. People also stretch it beyond broken glass: changing a Wikipedia page to nonsense is called vandalism, and so is a bad restoration of an old building or a shopping mall replacing a beautiful old street — that last use is a strong opinion dressed up as a legal word, and it is meant to be. Note that in American courts the charge is often written as ‘criminal mischief’ or ‘malicious mischief’ instead, so a student reading US news may not see the word where they expect it.
From the word’s history
From French vandalisme, after the Vandals, who looted Rome in 455.
借自法文 vandalisme，取名自西元 455 年洗劫羅馬的汪達爾人。
組成Borrowed from French vandalisme, coined by Henri Grégoire during the French Revolution to attack the destruction of artworks. Broken down: vandal (the ancient Germanic people, later ‘a destroyer’) + -ism, the ending that turns a person or idea into a practice or behaviour.
原始詞典資料1 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。
vandalismnoun/ˈvændəlɪzm̩/
- 1
Willful damage to or destruction of any property, such as graffiti or defacement.
- As we turned down the street I was appalled by the vandalism: spray paint and smashed windows that were everywhere.
- Bradford once boasted two stations with overall roofs. The pair were swept away in the 1970s in an act of corporate and civic vandalism.
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。