What
makes people recalcitrant enough to
stand up to the power or superior authority? Is it their intransigent characteristic in personality they were born with? Is
it their amaranthine determination
and bravery to go against people who deny
others justice? Well, quite often times, it is “money” that that makes
people confident and square no matter what others tell them to do. To wit, as long as one has enough money
to carry on his/her life with, they don’t need to be reluctantly amenable to others. However, it could be quite the opposite. If
they are deprived of money, they are apt to get spiteful in the state of
insufficiency and seek after money that seems to miche all the time. Yes, “pecuniary matter” is such a necessary
evil that could make us happy or miserable and end up showing turpitude that often goes with money.
Today,
let me give you a variety of English names for money.
buck: derived from
“buckskin” (=deer skin or sheep skin) back in the mid 19th century
in America. Native American Indians and frontiersmen used buckskin as a unit of
exchange in their trading.
cabbage:
green paper money
clam: slang for dollar
bill. (In ancient times, it is thought that various shells were used as units
of exchange.)
ducat: derived
from the Latin word for “Duke”. The Duke of Sicily first issued the currency
and it was called ducat.
greenback: In
1862, the U.S. President Lincoln signed the first Act to print paper currency
using green ink. Since then on, the dollar bill has been called as the
greenback.
shekel:
a slang term for “cash” used in English since the first half of the 19th
century. It is also the national currency of Israel.
cheddar:
This name would firstly remind you of cheese, but the expression is related to
the cheese distributed to welfare recipients by the US government (i.e.,
Government Cheese)
dough: This
expression derives from “doughface”, the notorious nickname given to Northern
Democrats working for the South for financial purpose preceding the Civil War.
*mammon: the
word from the Bible meaning wealth and
riches that imply the connotation of "unrighteous," because the abuse of
riches is more frequent than their right use.
Expressions
recalcitrant:
(adjective) resisting authority or control/ not obedient or compliant/ hard to
manage or operate
intransigent:
(adjective) refusing to agree or compromise/ inflexible or uncompromising
amaranthine:
(adjective) unfading/ everlasting
to deny somebody justice:
(verb) to not treat somebody in a fair or equal way as with others
to wit:
(idiomatic phrase) that is to say, in other words
amenable:
(adjective) obedientdeny
miche:
(verb) to lurk out of sight
pecuniary matter:
(noun) financial matter/ things related to money
turpitude:
a vile or depraved act/ shameful character/ depravity
Comments
Post a Comment