| 释义 |
whaler|ˈhweɪlə(r)|
[f. whale n. or v.1 + -er1.]
1. A person engaged in whaling; a whale-catcher.
1684Roxb. Ball. (1885) V. 457 Without you do now imploy the Wheelers to do 't, Ye ne'r will be able to bring all about. 1775Romans Florida App. 79 The North, or Grand Bahama bank, is little frequented but by whalers and turtlers. 1843Penny Cycl. XXVII. 752/1 The whalers kill the calves in order to capture the mother. 1895Gore-Booth Sea Fishing (Badm. Libr.) xvi. 476 Two bollard heads (pronounced ‘bullet heads’ by the Scotch whalers).
2. a. A vessel used in whale-fishing. b. = whale-boat b.
1806Sydney Gaz. in O'Hara's Hist. N.S. Wales (1817) 270 Arrived..same day, the Aurora south whaler. 1817Byron Beppo lxi, Stopp'd by the elements, like a whaler. 1893Times 3 July 6/2 Some loose oars..with which I supported myself until picked up by the Dreadnought's whaler. 1898Kipling Fleet in Being v. 62 The First Lieutenant..had the whaler's crew sleeping all handy by. 1909Athenæum 13 Mar. 320/1 The original plan was to descend the Mackenzie to the Beaufort Sea, leaving the stores to come round by whaler.
3. Anything unusually large of its kind; a ‘whacker’, ‘whopper’. U.S. slang.
a1860Georgia Scenes 184 (Bartlett) ‘He's a whaler!’ said Rory; ‘but his face is mighty little for his body and legs.’ 1873Leland Egypt. Sketch-Bk. 25, I shared..a cabin with a captain who had been a whaler for forty years; and he was a whaler! and great at ‘whalers’.
4. Also waler. [ellipt. f. Murrumbidgee w(h)aler s.v. Murrumbidgee: (see also quot. 1945).] A tramp or ‘sundowner’. Austral. slang.
1883R. E. N. Twopeny Town Life in Australia 244 A ‘waler’ is a bushman who is ‘on the loaf’. He ‘humps his drum’, or ‘swag’, and ‘starts on the wallaby track’. 1886F. Cowan Australia 31 The Whaler: of the Murrumbidgee and the Darling; when it suits his pleasure and convenience, a dolce-far-niente outcast in the fertile valleys of the rivers named, beyond the running of a warrant or a writ. 1903‘T. Collins’ Such is Life 4 Willoughby, who was travelling loose with Thompson and Cooper, was a whaler. 1945Baker Austral. Lang. v. 102 According to an old-timer correspondent: ‘They were so apt to lie about the size of the ‘whales’ they caught that a generic name for this class of unemployable traveller came into being.’ This explanation is open to some doubt... In our early days New South Welsh horses exported to India for army use were known as walers. The original Murrumbidgee whalers may therefore have been N.S.W. tramps... Blood brethren of the whaler (this spelling is retained because tradition holds mainly to the ‘whale’ theory)..are the Domain dosser, [etc.]. 1963A. Marshall In Mine Own Heart (1964) xx. 164 The whaler, a term that had originated from the name given to those swagmen who in the early days spent their time moving up and down the Murrumbidgee River..now applied to those who walked from town to town in preference to jumping trains. 1965B. Wannan Fair Go, Spinner ii. 53 After drinking some Wilcannia beer, a whaler I once saw got up and started to fight with himself.
5. Special Combs. whalerman = whaler 1; whaler shark, any of several sharks of the genus Galeolemma, found in Australasian waters.
1891R. L. Stevenson In South Seas (1896) i. xiii. 128 Captain Chase, they called him, an old whaler-man. 1963Times 18 May 9/7 The first big bang was at night and the Norwegian whalermen heard it six miles away. 1974G. Jenkins Bridge of Magpies ii. 33 Old whaler⁓men's graves in New England.
[1882J. E. Tenison-Woods Fish New South Wales iv. 92 The following list [of sharks] includes all that are known to occur in our seas:..the Whaler, [etc.]. ]1937Z. Grey Amer. Angler in Austral. vii. 70 Among the trawlers it was not unusual to see a dozen whaler sharks all in a bunch. 1972Islander (Victoria, B.C.) 9 Apr. 7/1 A whaler shark darting over the reef flat with a sudden burst of speed. |