be besotted with~
All human history, you might say, is the story of people not knowing what lies around the corner. The typical family snapshot catches the pathos of this ignorance very well: the 12-year-old schoolboy smiling on a seaside promenade in 1935 is unaware of his fate on a North Atlantic convoy six years later. …
I can’t have known this history when I sat in a cinema to watch them, soon after they came out. In the case of Tom Jones I sat in several cinemas, because I was besotted with Susannah York, and after the film’s main run had ended in the big cities I took buses to see her in country towns and polite Glasgow suburbs. (Skip the rest)
今回取り上げる表現は、be besotted with~ です。besotte 発音は /bɪsάṭɪd/ となります。私は記事にある “I was besotted with Susannah York” を文脈から「Susannah York に魅了された」と推測しました。以下で意味等を確認していきます。
まず意味を LDOCE でみると、“to love or want someone or something so much that you cannot think or behave sensibly” とあり、Cambridge Dictionary には “completely in love with someone and always thinking of them” と定義されていました。
次に語源を OED でみると、“Late 16th century: past participle of besot ‘make foolishly affectionate’, from be- ‘cause to be’ + sot.” とありました。
以上のことから、be besotted with~ は「~に心を奪われた」と訳すことができ、対象に非常に強く魅了されることを表すことがわかりました。(OkaUchi)
