seat-of-the-pants
少し前の記事ですが、気になったことがあったので使います。BeatlesのMagical Mystery Tourの新装版が作られた時の記事の一部です。
The Beatles’ Seat-of-the-Pants Movie
In the documentary, all four Beatles are heard from, including Mr. McCartney and Ringo Starr in fresh interviews. So are people who were in the film and who did the behind-the-scenes work, which was seat-of-the-pants, since the Beatles were largely making things up as they went along.
‘Magical Mystery Tour Revisited,’ the Beatles on PBS - The New York Times
ここでのseat-of-the-pantsとはどういう意味なのでしょうか。直訳すると、「パンツの席」となりますが、それだと意味がわかりません。そこで辞書を引いてみると「（計画・技術によらず）直感や経験に頼った」という意味であるとわかりました。（『ジーニアス英和辞典 第４版』大修館）
関連語で、to fly by the seat of one's pantsというものがありましたが、これはWikitionaryで"To pilot an aircraft without the aid of instruments and without a flight plan, using only instinct, visual observation, and practical judgment."という風に載っていました。seat-of-the-pantsの語源は、｢（パイロットが）計器などに頼らずに飛行機を操縦する｣というところからきているみたいです。
こういった見た目では判断できない単語の意味を知っていくことはすごく楽しいので、これからもこのような単語をどんどんインプットしていきたいと思います。（Haramii）
knock out
今年の日本はどれくらい雪が降るのでしょうか。オレゴン州ではもう雪での被害が出てきているようです。
Snowy weather knocks out power for thousands in Southern Oregon
Nearly 13,000 Pacific Power customers in Josephine and Jackson counties after wet snow caused several trees to fall on power lines Friday.
Pacific Power officials estimate service being restored to most households by late Saturday evening.
knock out という言葉を見ると、まず最初にボクシングのK.Oという言葉が思い浮かびます。英英のLDOCEには、"to damage something so that it does not work"と定義されています。（『ウィズダム英和辞典 第２版』三省堂）には、「（くだけて）たたきのめす、再起不能にさせる〈比喩的にも用いる〉」と定義されています。
木が送電線の上に倒れこむくらいの雪ですから、かなりの雪が降っていたのでしょう。
また、過去にもknock outはブログで取り上げられています。（Astroriver）
stand still
The New Zealand Heraldから。
Shark swims too close for comfort
A one-metre shark gave swimmers a scare at a Hawkes Bay beach yesterday.
But the Department of Conservation says the shark is no cause for alarm.
A Napier woman reported seeing the shark while looking after four children in a shallow part of the water yesterday afternoon at Sandy Beach near Ahuriri.
She told the children to stand still while the shark swam by and around to rocks at the beach.
DoC's shark expert and marine species scientific officer, Clinton Duffy, said a 1m shark was not a threat.
"They are not considered a risk until they get to about 1.8m long. That is the size when most species of sharks can do some harm if they really wanted to."
Mr Duffy said it was not unusual to see sharks close to shore during summer.
Some of the "harmless" species normally around at this time of the year included school sharks, rig sharks or baby bronze whalers.
"The bronze whalers do pup in the Bay and could be expected to drop their pups in shallow water around about now. Pups are about 70cm to 80cm long when they are born.
"If you see a shark and you're a bit worried about it, the best thing to do is to get out of the water as quickly and calmly as possible without too much fuss.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10855278
stand stillは「立ったままで」という意味かなと思い、気にせず流して読んでしまいましたが、「じっと立っている、活動しない、静止する、停滞している、現状にとどまる」という意味があるようです。（英辞朗 on the WEB）また、「＜米＞[〜を]我慢する」という意味もあるようです（『ジーニアス英和大辞典』）。しかしここでは、「（彼女は子ども達に）じっとしているように（言った）」ということになりますね。(Nat)
1月初旬に語彙チェック！
冬季休暇に入り，この時期になるとあれやこれやでなまけがちになりますが（それもある意味，必要なのかもしれませんが），「常時」の気持ちだけは忘れないようにしてください。まずは毎日，アップすることを，歯みがきのように習慣化できるかどうか，それは今後の英語学習にとても大切なことなのですよ。
前回のチェックのときに使った文章です。即座に意味が浮かぶかどうか自分で時間をくぎってやってみること。
なお，1月の最初には海外組はのぞいて（オンラインでできる課題を出します），表現の2回目のチェックをします。前回よりも精度が高まるかどうかの鍵はなによりもあなた自身の中にあります。（UG）
１）The lineup wouldn't go down well with the Chinese people.
２）I'll be out of town for a while.
３）The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office has decided against filing an indictment against him.
４）She is not out of the woods yet.
５）It seems that the guy has a milking cow.
６）Mr. Cuomo was said to be especially lukewarm, according to several people who were present at or were briefed on the discussion.
７）A knife-wielding man was holed up at a shinkin bank branch in Toyokawa.
８）Shall we pick up where we left off before the break?
９）Sorry I couldn't have been more help.
１０）It is biting off more than it can chew.
１１）None of the three have managed to generate the brand pizazz of Apple.
１２）You’ve got to be in it to win it.
１３）He was a vocal commentator on social issues.
１４）The police look the other way.
１５）Do you need medical attention?
１６）The two sides hammered out a contract.
１７）Burger King offers an all-you-can-eat Whopper buffet.
１８）Everybody at school would call me names.
１９）Bangladesh's central bank sought an international tender in July.
２０）He was pressing ahead to master the technology needed to deliver a nuclear warhead on a intercontinental ballistic missile.
spaces
悲劇から立ち直るのには時間がかかります。でも教育は進めなければいけません。どういう形で学校を再開するのか関係者の悩みは尽きません。本日のNYTから。
spaceをわれわれは通常uncountableで「空間」という意味で使います。しかし記事ではspacesとなっていることに注目しましょう。これはどうしてなのでしょうか。クリスマスプレゼント買いで忙しいMinnesotaくん，どうぞ。（UG）
Varied Paths Toward Healing for Sites of Terrorized Schools
At Columbine High School, a glass atrium glistens in the sunlight.
A one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., was demolished just over a week after the 2006 shooting of 10 girls inside.
Inside Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, pastel walls enclose a peace center.
At Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, a flower garden welcomes students.
These spaces were once other things: the second-floor library where two killers completed a rampage that left 12 fellow high school students and a teacher dead; the classrooms where 30 college students and faculty members were gunned down by another student; and the gymnasium where 16 5- and 6-year-old children and their teacher were fatally shot by an intruder.
School officials in Newtown, Conn., said this week that they had not yet begun to discuss the future of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 first graders and 6 staff members were killed inside. But in the indelible tragedies that came before, school officials and parents were often so haunted by the violence that they sought to dismantle whole sections of buildings, ripping out blood-soaked floors and every last chunk of cinder block from the rooms where the killings took place. And when the spaces were put back together, if they were not razed completely, they often had new layouts and amenities that rendered them nearly unrecognizable — which is more or less the point.
These new spaces were typically culminations of long and painful healing processes for devastated families and communities. School officials and parents say their wounds are still there, though their scars grow a little thicker with each passing year, as the survivors graduate and new students too young to remember what happened take their places.
“A school should not be a memorial,” said Cindy Stevenson, superintendent in Jefferson County, Colo., where school officials and parents rejected the idea of closing Columbine High School after the shooting. “We don’t ever want to forget those children, but you also need to say a school is a living, growing, vibrant place.”
For now, Sandy Hook Elementary remains a crime scene, a bullet-ravaged shell that has become a worldwide symbol of anguish. The school’s more than 400 students will resume classes in January in a former school nearby that is being painstakingly remade to resemble the one they left behind, down to the exact color of the classroom walls. Even their old desks and chairs are being moved over from Sandy Hook.
“All of our efforts have been focused on healing our children and families and restarting school,” William Hart, a Newtown school board member, wrote in an e-mail, saying, “we have been unable to put any energy into planning for the future of that building.”
He added, “I suspect it may be some time before we can do so.”
a floating ode
ジョブズ氏のヨットが押収されたというCNNニュースです。
問題の赤字が気になったのですが、floating odeはどういう意味なのでしょうか。あまり自信がありませんが、odeは「頌歌」つまり" a poem or song written in order to praise a person or thing＝人や物事を賞賛するために書かれた歌や詩"(LDOCE)です。ベートーベンの第９交響曲は"Ode to joy"ですね。
floatingは"often changing, and not staying the same"(ibid)という意味です。floatは船などによく使う動詞ですね。つまり、a floating odeはThe Venusのことですが，シンプルなデザインに美的価値観を見い出した故ジョブズ氏とスタルク氏にとっては「海に浮かぶ（floating）傑作」というような意味と同時にデザイン代金が未払いになったままのどっちつかずの状態（floating）をかけた言い回しになっていると思いました（しかしわかりにく！）。(Minnesota)
(CNN) -- The megayacht that Steve Jobs commissioned in the final years of his life has been impounded in Amsterdam after a payment dispute involving the designer, Philippe Starck.
The Venus, a 100-million-euro ($137.5 million), 260-foot-long yacht, made its unofficial debut in late October. It's currently stuck in the Port of Amsterdam after Starck hired a debt-collection agency to attempt to remit the final payment for his design.
According to lawyers at Ubik -- Starck's design company -- speaking with Reuters, the designer has only received 6 million of the 9-million-euro commission and is seeking the rest of the payment before the Venus will be released.
"These guys [Jobs and Starck] trusted each other, so there wasn't a very detailed contract," Roelant Klaassen, a lawyer for Ubik, told Reuters.
The Venus is a floating ode to both Jobs and Starck's minimalist aesthetic. Made entirely out of aluminum, with 40-foot-long floor-to-ceiling windows lining the passenger compartment and seven 27-inch iMacs making up the command center.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-yacht/index.html?iref=allsearch
spaces（回答）
UG先生からのご指名にお答えいたします。(spaces - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心：言葉の森から)
spaceは不可算名詞ですが、その「空間」をある一定の目的ごとに分けると可算名詞にもなりうるというイメージを持ちました。やはり、LDOCEには”[uncountable and countable] an area, especially one used for a particular purpose”と載っています。
つまり、どれも陰惨な「殺人現場」ということではないでしょうか。それを婉曲的にspacesという書き方をしていると推測しました。あと、余談ですが印刷物やワープロなどで使う文字と文字の間隔に使うspaceもcountableですね。(Minnesota)
Varied Paths Toward Healing for Sites of Terrorized Schools
At Columbine High School, a glass atrium glistens in the sunlight.
A one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., was demolished just over a week after the 2006 shooting of 10 girls inside.
Inside Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall, pastel walls enclose a peace center.
At Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, a flower garden welcomes students.
These spaces were once other things: the second-floor library where two killers completed a rampage that left 12 fellow high school students and a teacher dead; the classrooms where 30 college students and faculty members were gunned down by another student; and the gymnasium where 16 5- and 6-year-old children and their teacher were fatally shot by an intruder.
beachhead
EVやpig-in carの市場に占める割合は決して高いとは言えませんが，今後は間違いなく主流になっていくでしょう。beachheadは軍事用語で「海岸堡（ほ）：敵前上陸後の最初の拠点」という意味。そこから転じて「足がかり, 出発点」という意味があります（『プログレッシブ英和中辞典』小学館）。この文脈におけるestablished a beachheadは「（市場への）足がかりを築いた」と解釈できます。（Koyamamoto）
Make Way for Kilowatts: A Growing-Up Year for Plug-Ins
FOR those who advocate the electrification of the automobile, it has been a good year. No fewer than eight significant plug-in models came to market in the United States in 2012.
That’s progress, but even if the absolute number was modest, the heft of the companies behind them could not be ignored: battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars arrived from BMW and Honda, while Ford and Toyota each released two. Tesla and Coda, California-based electric specialists, offered sedans with starkly different levels of appeal.
...Public charging stations continue to sprout in forward-thinking communities, but there was little headway toward standardizing plugs for the fast-charging systems that would help to neutralize public resistance to E.V.’s.
Despite their small share of overall sales, plug-in cars seem to have established a beachhead this year, regardless of the ups and downs revealed in the year’s electric car headlines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/automobiles/a-growing-up-year-for-plug-ins.html?hpw&_r=0
welfare 再び
朝鮮中央通信は「先月３日、羅先市に観光目的で入ったアメリカ人男性が敵対的な犯罪を行い、該当機関に抑留された」と報じました。平壌にあるスウェーデン大使館員が２１日、男性に面会したということですが（北朝鮮と米国間には国交がないため），詳細は分かっていません。
welfareは一般には「福祉」（明治時代にこの概念を訳したのは誰だったかな...）と訳されますが，ここは一個人のことですね。以前にも扱いましたが，やはりとてもつかみにくい単語です。この文脈の場合にはどう訳したらよいでしょうか。Othelloくん，どうぞ。（UG）
North Korea says it has arrested American citizen
A U.S. official told CNN last week that an American citizen named Kenneth Bae had been detained in North Korea for more than a month.
The U.S. official said Bae had made several trips to North Korea previously, and that he was not believed to have been mistreated in detention.
Neither Washington nor Seoul has yet confirmed that Bae is the same man referred to by North Korean state media.
His detention was first reported by South Korean newspapers, which said that Bae, a tour operator, entered North Korea at the port city of Rajin accompanied by five other tourists. Bae and the group were on a five-day trip to the country, according to South Korea's Yonhap News.
One of the tour members was carrying a computer hard disk "that apparently contained sensitive information," Yonhap News reported, citing a Korean-language paper.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said last week that the United States was aware of the reports of Bae's detention, but that it would not discuss the issue further because of privacy issues.
"We obviously have no higher priority than the welfare of our citizens. As you may know we have no representation in Pyongyang. The Embassy of Sweden acts as our protecting power for issues involving U.S. citizens in North Korea," Nuland said then.
Consular officials from the Swedish Embassy visited Bae on Friday, KCNA said.
The United States and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/21/world/asia/north-korea-us-arrest/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
log
英国のキャメロン首相は頭を抱えているようです。
Andrew Mitchell’s camp turns its guns on David Cameron over Plebgate
‘Disgraceful’ PM accused of letting Chief Whip 'swing in the wind'
David Cameron was last night accused of leaving Andrew Mitchell “swinging in the wind” because he knew about evidence that undermined policemen's allegations against him – and could have saved his political career.
Friends of the former Chief Whip said it was "disgraceful" that Mr Cameron had not called for an official investigation once Downing Street CCTV footage had directly contradicted the officers' accounts of the incident. Instead, they suggested, Mr Cameron had made a calculation that the only way to save Mr Mitchell's career would have been to accuse the policemen – who are responsible for protecting senior politicians – of lying, which he was not prepared to do.
The Independent revealed yesterday that the Prime Minister had known for almost three months that at least one member of his elite protection unit may have fabricated parts of the Downing Street police log about the confrontation with Mr Mitchell.
一番気になったlogという単語を拾います。「丸太」という意味でおなじみの単語ですが、ここでは「・・・を航海日誌[走行日誌、実験記録、更新記録など]に記録する」「＜勝利など＞を記録する、得る」（『ジーニアス英和辞典 第３版』大修館）となります。
また、過去にはUG先生が別の意味を持つlogについて書かれていたので、こちらも要チェックです。
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/A30/20120923/1348385936
ともあれ警察と政界が癒着しあい、都合の良い証拠捏造などが起きていないことを願います。(Shou-VR*)
ご指名質問:irreverent
遅くなりましたが、UG先生のご指名質問にお答え致します。内容はここでのirreverentについてです。
Oakland A's introduce new shortstop Hiroyuki Nakajima
OAKLAND -- Flashing confidence, a sense of humor and a very wide smile, Hiroyuki Nakajima introduced himself as a potentially promising fit to the A's multicultural roster on Tuesday. Most importantly, the 30-year-old Japanese veteran will be Oakland's starting shortstop after agreeing Monday to a two-year, $6.5 million contract that includes a club option for a third year.
It appears the A's have added another character to their irreverent, extroverted international clubhouse scene. After studying nervously Monday night to introduce himself in English, the first question asked of Nakajima was why he picked Oakland as his American baseball destination.
"(A's general manager) Billy Beane is extremely sexy and cool," he said, prompting considerable laughter from a roomful of Bay Area and Japanese media. "That's definitely one of the reasons I signed here."
Answering a subsequent question about making a cultural adjustment from Japan to the U.S., Nakajima jokingly answered that the lack of bathtubs in America could be a concern. At the end of his news conference, he once again broke into English to add, "I will do my best for the team, but I also want to Bernie Dance with Oakland."
http://www.insidebayarea.com/breaking-news/ci_22217986/oakland-introduce-
irreventはUG先生もおっしゃっている通り、「不遜な、無礼な」という意味がありますが。ここでは少し違った意味で使われていると感じました。LDOCEには'someone that is irreverent, does not show respect for organizations, customs, beliefs etc that most other people respect - often used to show approval"とあります。またCambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionaryではと、"lacking the expected respect for official, important or holy things"と定義されています。しばしば、「賛成、同意」の意味で扱われる事もあるようです。つまりここでは「クラブの外向的で、歓迎的なクラブの雰囲気」という事を表しているのではないでしょうか。(EnDough)
Ho high ho
クリスマスも近いので、クリスマスらしい表現を少し前のJapan Todayから。Picture of Dayはこんな見出しでした。
Ho high ho
http://www.japantoday.com/category/picture-of-the-day/view/ho-high-ho
みなさんもおわかりの通り、この見出しはhighとheigh-hoの二つの意味がかけられています。heigh-hoはやや古い表現ですが、軽い上昇口調で発音すると「ああ、やれやれ《退屈・落胆・疲労等のため息》」という意味(『ジーニアス英和辞典』第4版、大修館書店)になります。ここではho hoというSanta Clausの笑い声(ibid)と共に用いられ、「なぜこんな場所でもSanta Clausにならなければならないんだ」という気持ちを表していると思いました。
またheigh-hoは歓喜・励ましの叫びとして「いいぞ、がんばれ」という意味(ibid)もあります。ディズニー映画の『白雪姫』に出てくる七人の小人が使うのはこの意味ですね。フレーズとしては知っていましたが、意味は知らなかったので、確認しておきます。(EnDough)
