hair-trigger 復習

食物連鎖の常識を覆す「捕食動物」である植物の生態の解明に挑みます。

Plants That Are Predators

As a refined Victorian gentleman, Charles Darwin naturally gravitated toward the macabre, and few things fascinated him like those floral flouters of the conventional food chain: carnivorous plants. He experimented with them and wrote a major treatise about them. He called the Venus flytrap, with its elaborate hair-trigger snap trap and its lethal brew of digestive juices, “one of the most wonderful plants in the world.”

He compared the glistening and gothically tentacled sundew plant, or Drosera, to a “most sagacious animal” and said, “I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death.” To which a sagacious sundew might well have replied, Thanks, but I’ll take a damselfly instead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/science/plants-that-are-predators.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region&_r=0

今回取り上げる表現は “hair-trigger”です。G4（大修館書店）では「鋭敏な、触発性の；迅速な；すぐかっとなる」とありました。LDOCEでは “hair-trigger [only before noun]”で “easily made angry”と書かれていました。この意味は名詞 “hair trigger”からきた表現であり、同じくLDOCEでは “a trigger on a gun that needs very little pressure to fire the gun”と載っていました。この “hair”は「わずか」であることを示しています。
銃の引き金からきた表現であることが分かりましたが、銃の引き金のことをただただ「トリガー」ともいいますよね。これらの違いについてはONLINE　ETYMOLOGY　DCTIONARYに書かれていた内容を抜粋します。 “The difference between a hair-trigger and a common trigger is this--the hair-trigger, when set, lets off the cock by the slightest touch, whereas the common trigger requires a considerable degree of force, and consequently is longer in its operation. [Charles James, "Military Dictionary," London, 1802]”
（Inaho）

以前にも先輩が取り上げられています。
「一触即発hair-trigger」
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/A30/20101005/1286285176