| 释义 |
▪ I. penguin|ˈpɛngwɪn, ˈpɛŋgwɪn|
Also 6–7 pengwin, -gwyn, -guyn, 7 -guine, (8 pin-).
[Origin obscure: see Note below. It appears that the name was first given to the Great Auk or Gare-fowl of the seas of Newfoundland, still called in F. pingouin or pinguin (1600 in Hatz.-Darm.). But it was soon applied also to the birds now called penguins, in F. manchots (found by Drake at Magellan's Straits in 1578), which have a general external resemblance to the northern bird, though, in the opinion of zoologists, widely removed in structure. In this sense, also, Du. and Ger. pinguin, Da. and Sw. pingvin, all from English.]
†1. A former name of the Great Auk or Gare-fowl (Alca impennis). Obs.
1578Parkhurst Let. 13 Nov. in Hakluyt Voy. (1600) III. 133 Newfoundland is in a temperate Climate... There are..many other kind of birdes store, too long to write, especially at one Island named Penguin, where wee may driue them on a planke into our ship as many as shall lade her. These birdes are also called Penguins, and cannot flie. 1582Ingram's Narrative in Hakluyt Voy. (1589) 560 The Countrey men call them Penguins (which seemeth to be a Welsh name). a1589M. Hore's Voy. Cape Breton in 1536, ibid. 518 They came to part of the West Indies about Cape Breton, shaping their course thence Northeastwards, vntill they came to the Island of Penguin,..whereon they went and founde it full of great foules white and gray, as bigge as geese. 1620J. Mason New-found-land 4 The sea fowles, are Gulles, white and gray Penguins. 1664Butler Hud. i. ii. 60 And were invented first from Engins, As Indian Britans were from Penguins. 1678Ray Willughby's Ornith. 322 The Bird called Penguin by our Seamen, which seems to be Hoiers Goifugel. 1792G. Cartwright Jrnl. Resid. Labrador III. 55 (5 July 1785) A boat came in from Funk Island laden with birds, chiefly penguins. [1863Lyell Antiq. Man ii. 15 Among the bones of birds, scarcely any are more frequent..than those of the auk or penguin (Alca impennis).]
2. a. Now, The general name of birds of the family Spheniscidæ, including several genera of sea-fowl inhabiting the southern hemisphere, as near Cape Horn, the Falkland Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, etc., distinguished by having the wings represented by scaly ‘flippers’ or paddles with which they swim under water.
1588T. Candishe in Hakluyt Voy. (1589) 809 The Port of Desire... In this place we had gulles, puets, penguyns, and seales in aboundance. Ibid., We put into the Streight of Magelan, and on the 8 [Jan. 1587] we came vnto the Islands named by Sir Francis Drake the one Bartholomewe Island,..and the other Penguin Island. 1591J. Jane Last Voy. Candish ibid. (1600) III. 85 This Penguin hath the shape of a bird, but hath no wings, only two stumps in the place of wings. 1638Sir T. Herbert Trav. (ed. 2) 13 Here [‘Pengwin’ or Robben Island, near Cape Town] are also birds cal'd Pen-gwins (white-head in Welch) like Pigmies walking upright. 1655E. Terry Voy. E. India 26 There are very many great lazy fowls upon and about this Island [Robben Island] with great cole-black bodies and very white heads, called Penguins. 1678Ray Willughby's Ornith. 322 The Birds of this kind..the Hollanders from their fatness called Penguins. 1775Clayton in Phil. Trans. LXVI. 103 There are four kinds; the yellow, or king penguin; the red; the black or holey, from their burrowing under ground; and the jumping jacks, from their motion. 1877W. Thomson Voy. Challenger II. 167 The penguin as a rule swims under water, rising now and then and resting on the surface. 1885Newton in Encycl. Brit. XVIII. 45 Under the name Impennes we have a group of Birds, the Penguins... The title of an Order can scarcely be refused to them.
b. A machine like an aeroplane but incapable of flight, used in the early stages of an airman's training. Also, a non-flying member of an air force. Air Force slang.
1915G. Bacon All about Flying vi. 104 A ‘penguin’—a machine with engine not powerful enough to raise it from the ground. 1917J. R. McConnell Flying for France 143 The student is put on..a low-powered machine with very small wings... It could not leave the ground. The apparatus is jokingly and universally known as a Penguin. 1918Everybody's Mag. Jan. 113/2 An officer of flying status, but who for some reason does not fly, is called a ‘penguin’. 1918Sphere 4 May 76/2 The three official corps familiarly known as the Waacs, the Wrens, and the Penguins. 1919Athenæum 11 July 582/2 Members of the W.R.A.F. were called ‘Penguins’ because they were ‘flappers’ who did not fly. 1925Fraser & Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 221 Penguin was also a name for a type of low-powered aeroplane with small planes or wings, used for instructional purposes. 1942Gen 1 Sept. 14/2 No flier spares his contempt for the ‘penguins’, the nonflying administrative officers in the RAF. 1944G. Gibson Enemy Coast Ahead (1946) vi. 96 In the average Bomber Officers' Mess,..while penguins sing loudly in the mornings as they get up to shave, it was rather hard for the boys who had been up all night to get a good day's rest. 1950Partridge Here, There & Everywhere 53 When an airman refers to himself as a penguin, he is resorting to the specialized slang of the Air Force; all he means is that he is a member of the ground staff and therefore does not fly.
c. (With capital initial.) The proprietary name of Longman Penguin Limited, formerly Penguin Books Limited (1936–1966) and The Penguin Publishing Company Limited (1966–1972), used attrib. and absol. to designate paper-backed books or series of books published by this company. Also (rare) as v. trans., to publish as a Penguin book.
1935Times Lit. Suppl. 1 Aug. 491/1 We shall look forward to more Penguin Books, and we wish the experiment—a bold one—all success. 1938‘G. Orwell’ Homage to Catalonia x. 177, I..spent hours reading a succession of Penguin Library books. 1939Trade Marks Jrnl. 13 Dec. 1630/1 Penguin... Printed publications, stationery and bookbinding, but not including publications on birds, or shaped sheets of paper for display purposes. Penguin Books Limited,..West Drayton, Middlesex; manufacturers and publishers. 1940Graves & Hodge Long Week-End xxv. 426 Penguins were first published in 1936. 1948J. Betjeman Sel. Poems 84 Whether we like to sit with Penguin books In sheltered alcoves farther up the cliff. 1950D. E. Stevenson Music in Hills vi. 50 Miss Douglas..appeared from behind a large book⁓case with two Penguins in her hand. 1950W. Stevens Let. 15 Aug. (1967) 687 At the moment I am reading a Penguin Classic. 1951R. Macaulay Lett. to Friend (1961) 209 Mary Lavelle is Penguin'd. 1956J. Symons Paper Chase x. 69 Hedda Pont was at a table reading a Penguin thriller. 1959J. Braine Vodi i. 11 You can have those Penguins in the bottom of the clothes locker. 1962I. Murdoch Unofficial Rose v. 51 There were a few Penguin novels, but they looked dull English tea-party stuff. 1974Times Lit. Suppl. 11 Dec. 22/4 With the publication of Barnaby Rudge all but two of Dickens's novels..are now Penguined. 1976New Yorker 15 Nov. 187/1 Michael Hamburger, introducing the Penguin anthology of Enzensberger in translation, writes of the poet's ‘moral purpose at variance with his personal needs and perceptions’.
d. A man wearing evening dress (cf. penguin suit (a) in sense 3 below). rare.
1967Melody Maker 1 Apr. 9 Good Music had the sort of melody and clipping beat that even Victor Sylvester didn't have to alter so that the Brylcreemed penguins and their sequined partners could jig about in the ballrooms. 1976B. Bova Multiple Man (1977) v. 56 These stuffed penguins and their bejeweled ladies.
3. attrib. and Comb., as penguin kind; penguin duck, a variety of the common duck having the feet placed far back so as to induce a nearly erect attitude like that of a penguin; penguin grass, the Tussock-grass of the Falkland Islands, Poa flabellata; penguin rookery, an assemblage of penguins, a penguinery; penguin suit, (a) evening dress; (b) a type of suit worn by astronauts.
18..Tegetmeier Poultry 310 (Cass. Suppl.) The colours of the *Penguin duck are varied.
1775Clayton in Phil. Trans. LXVI. 100 Near the shore, where-ever there is a sandy soil, a species of grass grows, called *Penguin grass.
1774Goldsm. Nat. Hist. (1776) VI. 49 Those of the *Penguin kind..with round bills, legs hid in the abdomen, and short wings.
1885Newton in Encycl. Brit. XVIII. 491/2 The habit of the helpless birds, when breeding, to congregate by hundreds and thousands in what are called ‘*Penguin-rookeries’.
1967Partridge Dict. Slang Suppl. 1289/1 *Penguin suit, a dinner jacket. 1968R. Jeffries Traitor's Crime iv. 46 Some smooth bastard in a penguin suit. 1971N.Y. Times 10 June 18 The astronauts donned the tight-fitting overalls, known as a penguin suit, in which tension is produced by several layers of rubberized material. 1971Daily Tel. 1 July 30/5 During the Soyuz 9 and 11 flights, Russian cosmonauts..wore special suits, called ‘penguin’ suits. 1979K. M. Peyton Marion's Angels vi. 101 Geoff'd better go home for his penguin suit. I'll go up and get my tails. [Note. Our earliest examples of the name penguin are due to Hakluyt. His account of Hore's Voyage to Cape Breton was taken down by him, some fifty years after the event, from the mouth of Thomas Buts, a survivor of the voyage. If we could be sure that the name ‘Penguin Island’ dated back to 1536, this would be the earliest occurrence of the word, as it is certainly the earliest English notice of the bird. Ingram's Narrative, if reliable, would be evidence for the name in 1568–9; but his tale is discredited, and is thus evidence only that he had heard of the penguin by 1582, four years later than Parkhurst's letter to Hakluyt. The southern fowl, found by Drake (as by Magalhaens before him) at Magellan's Straits, is fully described in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, published by his nephew in 1628, ‘out of the Notes of Mr. Francis Fletcher’, Drake's chaplain (ed. Hakl. Soc., 1854, p. 75), but no name is there given to it. The name occurs however in a MS of 1677, stated to be a transcript of Fletcher's original Notes of 1578: ‘infinite were the number of fowles, which the Welsh men named Penguin, and Magilanus tearmed them geese’ (ibid. 72); but the absence of the name from the printed work of 1628, and from three other 16th c. accounts of the voyage (ibid. Appendix 217, 237, 279), in which the bird is described, makes the occurrence of penguin in Fletcher's original Notes somewhat doubtful. The name certainly occurs in the narrative of Candishe or Cavendish, 1588; though his statement that Drake named one of the isles ‘Penguin Island’ is at variance with that of the eye-witnesses Fletcher and Winter (ibid. 76, 279), who both state that he named it St. George's Island ‘in honour of England’. The attribution of the name penguin to ‘the Welsh men’, and its explanation as Welsh pen gwyn ‘white head’, appears also in Ingram, and later in Sir Thomas Herbert's Travels—in ed. 1634 as a surmise, in ed. 1638 as an accepted fact. But, besides that the Great Auk had not a white head (though it had white spots in front of the eyes), there are obvious historical difficulties, which some would remove in part by supposing the name to have been originally given by Breton fishermen. Other suggestions that the name is derived from L. pinguis ‘fat’, or is an alteration of ‘pin-wing’, referring to the rudimentary wings, are merely unsupported conjectures.] ▪ II. penguin
var. pinguin, a West Indian plant. |