| 释义 |
star-dust
Also stardust.
1. Astr. Innumerable minute stars, likened, as seen in the telescope, to particles of dust.
1844Smyth Cycle Celestial Obj. I. 307 In some straggling clusters the components are nearly of the same magnitude, but in others they are extremely different, the brighter individuals being apparently on a ground, as it were, of star dust, really ‘powdered with stars’. 1850Nichol Archit. Heavens 52 Masses still farther off may best be likened to a handful of golden sand, or, as it is aptly termed, star-dust. 1878Newcomb Pop. Astron. iv. i. 443 Many of them [these clusters] are so distant that the most powerful telescopes..show them only as a patch of star-dust.
2. Meteoric matter in fine particles supposed to fall upon the earth from space; ‘cosmic dust’.
1879A. Geikie Geol. Sk. xiii. (1882) 323 Mud gathers on the floor of these abysses [of the ocean]..so slowly that the very star-dust which falls from outer space forms an appreciable part of it.
3. fig. That which is illusory or insubstantial. Freq. in phr. to have stardust in one's eyes and varr.
1933E. Sitwell English Eccentrics iv. 116 Here comes the star-dust, the noisy chattering crowd of tipsters and smaller racing men. 1934V. Woolf Walter Sickert 20 His [sc. Sickert's] paint has a tangible quality; it is made not of air and star-dust but of oil and earth. 1967Wodehouse Company for Henry iii. 45 Clichy double overlay weight..centred by a pink rose within a ring of white stardust canes. 1975A. Hunter Gently with Love xxii. 81 ‘You had a different opinion of her once.’.. ‘I must have had some stardust in my eyes.’ 1977New Yorker 4 July 82/3 There is the silliness of the movie's plangency: hard to feel soupy about a talented couple giving up their love because of the stardust in their eyes. |