snuff out 復習
スポーツ選手のユニフォームや靴は、一体どこまで進歩してしまうのかと考えてしまいます。
EVERY ORINPIANS IS KIND OF A CYBORG
At the 2012 London Games, Rupp earned a silver medal in that event with a time of 27:30.90—less than half a second behind Great Britain’s Mo Farah (Rupp’s training partner, to add insult), who took gold with a time of 27:30:42. If Rupp had been sporting AeroBlades, perhaps things would have turned out differently.
“With technology like this, you’re literally changing the environment around you,” Holmes says. That doesn’t necessarily make it cheating; runners and swimmers achieve a similar effect by shaving their body hair before a race. But occasionally, gear goes too far.
The most famous example in recent memory occurred at the 2008 Summer Olympics, when swimmers wearing Speedo’s full-body polyurethane LZR Racer suits shattered several world records.
The suit, developed in Speedo’s Aqualab in Nottingham, England, could tighten a swimmer’s physique through compression. Copycat suits designed to trap air and increase buoyancy followed, and FINA, swimming’s governing body, banned them. “The argument was, this really isn’t the athlete anymore,” Holmes says. Still, he recalls how thrilling it was to watch them in action. “I remember sitting riveted in 2008, and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, another record broken!’ ”
The takeaway, it seems, is that technology should spur performance—but only a little. If a new piece of gear confers an advantages too great, too quickly, a sanctioning body will snuff it out. So designers improve incrementally. Take Speedo, for instance, which created suits for this summer’s Olympics that fit the new FINA regulations (no more full-body suits, and no more materials like polyurethane) but still apply lessons from the now-banned LZR Racers.
(一部抜粋)
http://www.wired.com/2016/08/every-olympian-kind-cyborg/
今回取り上げる表現は “snuff out”です。outが付くことにより、どういう意味になるのか気になったので調べてみました。
『ジーニアス英和辞典』（第五版，大修館）で調べたところ、「〈希望など〉を消滅させる，〈生命〉を奪う，〈敵など〉を殺す・鎮圧する，…を急に終わらせる」と書かれておりました。
Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition Reserved, Oxford University Press)によると “to stop or destroy sth completely”とのことで、かなり短めに定義されていました。
『ロングマン現代英英辞典』（五訂版）によると、 “to stop a candle burning by pressing the burning part with your fingers or by covering it”、 “to stop or end something in a sudden way”、 “to kill someone”と三つ定義されておりました。
以上から “stop”の意が強いように思います。
ちなみにsanctioning bodyは、何か規定などを決めるスポーツ機関を表しているものと思われます。（http://www.nasarallysport.com/d734/what_does_a_sanctioning_body_do)
(Gomez)
