stone-cold 復習

先日, 男子ゴルフの全英オープンが開幕しました。開幕初日, フィル・ミケルソン選手は歴史的快挙を目前に, 惜しくもチャンスを逃してしまったようです。

Lefty left on edge with 63 at Open

TROON, Scotland (AP) — Phil Mickelson was 16 feet away from a place in history he wouldn’t have to share with anyone.

Fans watched from a rooftop balcony. Royal Troon members strained to see out the window from the clubhouse behind the 18th green. Jack Nicklaus usually doesn’t watch golf on TV, but he made an exception for this moment.

中略

Mickelson pointed his putter toward the hole and was ready to step into history Thursday in the British Open when his birdie putt turned sharply to the right at the mouth of the hole, just enough to ride the edge around the back of the cup and sit there, teasing him.

“You made a beautiful read and putt on that last hole but got absolutely stone-cold robbed,” Nicklaus said in a message on Facebook.

Lefty plopped his hand on his face in disbelief. His caddie, Jim “Bones” Mackay, was so stunned that he fell over backward.

“It was one of the best rounds I’ve ever played ... and yet I want to shed a tear right now,” Mickelson said. “That putt on 18 was an opportunity to do something historical. I knew it, and with a foot to go I thought I had done it. I saw that ball rolling right in the center. I went to go get it. I had that surge of adrenaline that I had just shot 62, and then I had the heartbreak that I didn’t.”

以下省略

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0003081107

本日気になった表現は “stone-cold” です。

文字から石のような冷たさを想像できますが, 『リーダーズ英和中辞典』(研究社)で調べると, 形容詞では「冷えきった」, 副詞では「完全に」とありました。Oxford-Dictionaries.com には a. “completely cold”, また adv. “completely” と定義されています。先生も通訳入門の授業で，stone-broke（おけら）を例にあげられ，stone-という接頭辞の意味合いを述べられていました。

このことから, 今回の “stone-cold” には, 望みの一球を失った喪失感が込められているのではないかと思います。(Cayu)

以前, “stone-cold” に関連する記事が取り上げられていました。

The untrained eye, groan and stone-cold[Othelloの拾った英語表現２] - 田邉祐司ゼミ 常時英心：言葉の森から