Birds of a feather flock together

Meaning

Those of similar taste congregate in groups.

Origin

This proverb has been in use since at least the mid 16th century. In 1545, William Turner used a version of it in his papist satire The Rescuing of Romish Fox:

"Byrdes of on kynde and color flok and flye allwayes together."

The first known citation in print of the currently used English version of the phrase appeared in 1599, in The Dictionarie in Spanish and English, which was compiled by the English lexicographer John Minsheu:

Birdes of a feather will flocke togither.

The phrase also appears in Benjamin Jowett's 1856 translation of Plato's Republic. Clearly, if the it were present in the original Greek text then, at around 380BC, Plato's work would be a much earlier reference to it. What appears in Jowett's version is:

Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says.

Plato's text can be translated in other ways and it is safe to say it was Jowett in 1856, not Plato in 380BC, that considered the phrase to be old. The lack of any citation of it in English prior to the 16th century does tend to suggest that its literal translation wasn't present in The Republic - a text that was widely read by English scholars of the classics well before the 16th century.

In nature, birds of a single species do in fact frequently form flocks. Ornithologists explain this behaviour as a 'safety in numbers' tactic to reduce their risk of predation. In language terms, it was previously more common to refer to birds flying together than flocking together and many early citations use that form, for example Philemon Holland's translation of Livy's Romane historie, 1600:

"As commonly birds of a feather will flye together."

这几天大家谈论最多的就是猪流感，那么怎么说呢？

看看WHO的官方文章吧：

Swine influenza 猪流感

Current level of influenza pandemic alert raised from phase 4 to 5

Based on assessment of all available information and following several expert consultations, Dr Margaret Chan, WHO's Director-General raised the current level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to 5. She stated that all countries should immediately activate their pandemic preparedness plans. At this stage, effective and essential measures include heightened surveillance, early detection and treatment of cases, and infection control in all health facilities.

注释：

爱一个人就是在拔通电话时，突然不知道要说什么，才知道原来只是想听听那熟悉的声音，原来真正想拔通的，只是自己心底的一根弦。

I was moved in tears when I saw the last word. I even feel very sad without any reason. It makes me feel this girl's love is not concerning two people, but just herself. she is l...

I just watched "Culture Express" on CCTV-9, which was interesting and educational.

There are numerous old relics among the mordern complex.

I can name several of them:

1. Pekin Man Site北京人遗址

2. Ming T...

The Lantern Festival falls on the 15th day of the 1st lunar month. And this year it was yesterday-Feb. 9th. As early as the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 25), it had become a festival with great significance.

This day's important activ...

Dears,

In the year of ox, wish all my students a prosperous 2009!

Still, when you have any concerns or personal troubles, pls find me. I'll try my best to help you out!

Double cross Meaning

An act of treachery, perpetrated on a previous partner in a deceit.

Origin

The term 'double-cross' has been used in various contexts for many centuries, usually as a straightforward refer...

Happy New Year!

 

Wish you success in the year of ox!

 

Extend your best wishes here. It is FREE!!!

许多人刚开始接触纯英文网站的时候，看到满版的英文，不免有些望而却步，其实浏览英文网站并没有想象中的那么难，只要你掌握了基本的一些词汇，很快就会寻得一些浏览规律，今天要给大家介绍一些在浏览是使用英文网站常遇到的高频词汇。


browser　　　浏览器
website　　　网站
webpage/page　　　网页
homepage/home　　　主页；首页
hot　　　热门
more　　　更多...

最近center来了很多doctors。所以然，我就成了Joanna,Roy, Hanna and Vivian的“老师”

几天的接触，有一大感触：医生真的很辛苦，因为他们大多都有很不固定的班表，有很多的急诊。。。但是他们都非常的充实，因为他们努力学习的态度！

Roy and Hanna三课早早就抽时间学完了，昨天看到他们在英语角学习，不错啊！

Vivian，谢谢你的贺卡啊，非常的cute啊！
...

Sometimes I read novels from the website of The New Yorker, recently the web posted the year fiction 2008. Following are some highlights from those fictions.

1.  “She had big breasts, slim legs and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and at the start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine...”

From, “Clara,” by Roberto Bolaño.

2. “I quickened my pace and would surely have turned up the path and mounted the steps to my porch had I not looked through the driveway gate and seen what I thought was a moving shadow near the garage...”

From “Wakefield,” by E. L. Doctorow.

3.  “There was something about Ilan—manic, fragile, fidgety, womanizing (I imagined) Ilan—that was all at once like fancy coffee and bright-colored smutty flyers...”

From “The Region of Unlikeness,” by Rivka Galchen.

4.  “Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him and the firmness of his weight, and feeling as if she were surrounded by light...”

From “The Headstrong Historian,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

5.  "Do I sound idiotic? Forgive me, I’m going a little bonkers up here. Since the antifreeze leak—explosion, really—things have not been right...”

From “Lostronaut,” by Jonathan Lethem.

6.  “On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness. And he would say, ‘Why do this to yourself?’ He wanted to keep her from being hurt. He also wanted his wife and her friend to drift apart so that he never had to sit through another dinner party with the friend and her husband...”

From “The Dinner Party,” by Joshua Ferris.

7.  “There he stood at the stone gateway of the Harounis’ weekend home above Islamabad, a small bowlegged man with a lopsided, battered face. When the American wife’s car drove up, turning off the Murree road, Rezak saluted, eyes straight ahead, not looking at her. She sat in the back and smiled at him from the milky darkness of the car’s interior. What a funny little man!”

From “A Spoiled Man, ” by Daniyal Mueenuddin.

8.  “At first, people kept phoning, to make sure that Nita was not too depressed, not too lonely, not eating too little or drinking too much. (She had been such a diligent wine drinker that many forgot that she was now forbidden to drink at all.)...”

From “Free Radicals,” by Alice Munro.

9. “He couldn’t really remember life before the children. He couldn’t feel it as something he’d once lived. It was too far away, and buried. Something as simple as walking down the street—he was always a father...”

From “Bullfighting,” by Roddy Doyle.

10.  “Assuming a corner position, cougarlike, I monitored the gathering. There were various Bosnian TV personalities, recognizable by their Italian spectacles and their telegenic abundance of frowns and smirks. The writers at the party could be identified by the incoherence bubbling up on their stained-tie surfaces. I spotted the Minister of Culture, who resembled a mangy panda bear...”

From “The Noble Truths of Suffering,” by Aleksandar Hemon.

11.  “Wherever we went would be written about in magazines three or four months later. A single mention on a blog, and a place that had been spangled with beautiful, interesting faces would be swamped by young bankers in button-down shirts, nervously analyzing the room to see if they were having fun...”

From “Raj, Bohemian,” by Hari Kunzru.

12.  “He held his breath. She had to be at least twenty years younger than he. But it wasn’t their age difference, nor the fact that he was married, that made him feel uncertain of himself. The problem was his thought process: the lithium he was taking in small doses brought a slower speed to reality...”

From “Another Manhattan,” by Donald Antrim.

A famous writer from England is the key star of inventing Chirstmas Holiday. Charles Dickens recused his carrer and revivied the holiday spirits by one of his books" A Chirstmas Carol". In 1843, People did not celebrate Christmas as what we do today. There was no Christmas Cards in 1843 England, no Christmas trees at Royal Residence or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa or his million clones, no outpouring of "Yuletide greetings," and etc. In fact, despite all of Dickens's enthusiasms, the holiday was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. George's Day does today.

The decision to create Christmas (the term derives from the original "dismissal" or "festival," i.e., "Mass of Christ"), officially celebrating the birth of Jesus for the first time, brought mixed blessings to the Church. Indeed, many pagans found the new religion that embraced their old customs invit-ing, and the membership rolls grew. On the other hand, Church leaders found that their new Christmas celebrations often got out of hand. As soon as services were over for the day, churchgoers in early modern Europe found it perfectly acceptable to transition directly to a drunken bacchanal, espe-cially if they were part of the disenfranchised class.

Hello everyone, it has been a long time for A Phrase A Week not shown in this blog, today it's the grand returning of the part!

Enjoy it!

Make no bones about

Meaning

To state a fact in a way that allows no doubt. To have no objection to.

Origin

This is another of those ancient phrases that we accept with our mother's milk as an idiom but which seem quite strange when we later give it some thought. When we are trying to convey that we acknowledge or have no objection to something, why bring bones into it?

It has been suggested that the bones were dice, which were previously made from bone and are still called bones in gambling circles. That explanation doesn't stand up to scrutiny - 'to make no dice about it' makes little sense. Also, in a 1542 translation of Erasmus's Paraphrase of Luke he discussed the command given to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and wrote that 'he made no bones about it but went to offer up his son.' Erasmus wasn't noted for his visits to the gaming tables and would hardly have used betting terminology to discuss a biblical text.

The actual source of this phrase is closer to home and hearth. In 15th century England, if someone wanted to express their dissatisfaction with something, they didn't 'make bones about it', they used the original form of the phrase and 'found bones in it'. This is a reference to the unwelcome discovery of bones in soup - bones = bad, no bones = good. If you found 'no bones' in your meal you were able to swallow it without any difficulty or objection.

The earliest citation of the phrase in print comes from the Paston Letters, which include a collection of texts from 1459 relating to a dispute between Paston and the family of the Norfolk soldier Sir John Fastolf (Fastolf was, incidentally, the source of the character Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV). In the Paston Letters, the context of which is that the litigants are finally accepting a verdict with no objection, Paston includes the line:

"And fond that tyme no bonys in the matere." [and found that time no bones in the matter]

'Making bones' is usually expressed in the negative. There are rare occurrences of people being described as 'making bones' about this or that, and an early example comes from Richard Simpson's The School of Shakspere, 1878:

"Elizabeth was thus making huge bones of sending some £7000 over for the general purposes of the government in Ireland."

'Make no bones about it' is now rather archaic and heard less often than before. It did return briefly during the 1980s, as an example of the 'waiter, I'll have a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy' form of joke. 'Waiter, I'll have tomato soup and make no bones about it' linked neatly back to the phrase's culinary origin.

感冒了，拼命的咳嗽，痛苦的无以复加！

可是在这样的大环境下，还是得拖着沉重的脚步上班去！

 Bombay Terrorists' Attack-Nov.26th

摘自China Daily 一段文章的开头部分，大家都可以来试试看

 

The international community has intensely condemned Wednesday’s terror attacks in the Indian financial capital, Mumbai, or known a...

Good morning.

Nearly 150 years ago, in one of the darkest years of our nation's history,

President Abraham Lincoln set aside（留出） the last Thursday in November

as a day of Thanksgiving.America was split by Civi...

两个多月不见Cherry，我还以为她上班去了。真勤劳啊！

前天见着她了，一问，居然是得了阑尾炎！

在中心大家当然是英文交谈啊，可是这个怎么说呢？

我说：这个单词我背过的，可是就是想不起来了。。。

Cherry接：这个单词我之前还查了的，可是也想不起来了。。。

汗。。。

昨天拿出单词本，赶快复习，原来阑尾叫appendix（以前教双语生物，把大肠，小肠，盲肠训练的学生滚瓜...

乌龟受伤，让蜗牛去买药。过了2个小时，蜗牛还没回来。乌龟急了骂道：TMD再不回来老子就死了!这时门外传来了蜗牛的声音：你TMD再说老子不去了!

 English Version:

One day a little turle was injured badly. So he begged to his friend, little Snail,"My dear friend, please go to the pharmacy and ...

看到一篇很好的文章，与大家分享！其中加了自己的一些看法和观点，联系了一些我们的实际情况，就当时一篇读书笔记吧！

     不知道大家还记得上学的时候，老师会让几个人组成一个学习小组来一起学习吗？

　　如果你能找到几个跟你目的相同的人一起学习，你学习的速度会加快好几倍．最好的方式就是找到几个可以互相见面的人，每周约定一个时间，大家可以center碰头，也可以电话联系约定时间、地点．You can make an a...

Ann will take her  psychology exam in two weeks. Let's wish her good luck!!

 

The new semester is starting this week in many schools! Luckily, we still have some universities, which will start in mid or even late September. It's going to be a whole new semester with lots of new things: new subjects, new lecturers, new teache...

[本日志已设置加密]

Helen's--

There are a lot of important people in my life. They are my torches in different period of my life. They are my brainpower. They give me advice when I am lost; they cheer me up when I am upset; they congratulate and hold celebratio...

This is a topic I saw at a certain website. I thought it would be very interesting if all my students can open their mouths and it is a good chance for them to talk and even write.  其实这真的是一个很好的机会哦，大家可以试着写出你们的观点啊！

 Topic: There must...

Bats in the belfry
Meaning
Crazy; eccentric.
Origin
Bats are, of course, the erratically flying mammals and 'belfries' are bell towers, sometimes found at the top of churches. 'Bats in the belfry' refers to someone who acts as though he has bats careering around his topmost part, i.e. his head
It has the sound of a phrase from Olde Englande and it certainly has the imagery to fit into any number of Gothic novels based in English parsonages or turreted castles. In fact, it comes from the USA; nor is it especially old. All the early citations are from American authors and date from the start of the 20th century. For example, this piece from the Ohio newspaper The Newark Daily Advocate, October 1900:
To his hundreds of friends and acquaintances in Newark, these purile [sic] and senseless attacks on Hon. John W. Cassingham are akin to the vaporings of the fellow with a large flock of bats in his belfry."
Ambrose Bierce, also American, used the term in a piece for Cosmopolitan Magazine, in July 1907, describing it as a new curiosity:
"He was especially charmed with the phrase 'bats in the belfry', and would indubitably substitute it for 'possessed of a devil', the Scriptural diagnosis of insanity."
The use of 'bats' and 'batty' to denote odd behaviour originated around the same time as 'bats in the belfry' and they are clearly related. Again, the first authors to use the words are American:
1903 A. L. Kleberg - Slang Fables from Afar: "She ... acted so queer ... that he decided she was Batty."
1919 Fannie Hurst - Humoresque: "'Are you bats?' she said."
There have been several attempts over the years to associate the term 'batty' with various people called Batty or Battie, notably the 18th century physician William Battie. He was a governor of the Bethlem Hospital, a.k.a. Bedlam, and physician to St Luke's Hospital for Lunaticks, where he wrote A Treatise on Madness. Despite those illustrious credentials, it was bats rather than Battie that caused scatterbrained people to be called 'batty'.

Dear secret,

I knew there was a serect editor helping me fresh my blog.有时由于繁忙的工作，我会懒的更新了！

谢谢你，我亲爱的朋友，谢谢你提供我们这么多丰富的知识，也给了我这么多感动！

Tears in my eyes!

Thank you so much!

It is really hot these days!

Every time you go out, you will be sweating and get all soaked back home, even if you just go out for ten minutes!

Stay away from sunshine and keep a cool mood!

Hello there,

these days I am really busy with some errands, so no updates in the last few days. Now I  have more free time, I will keep continue on the script of Friends, if you are interested. Any questions or requests, just drop on the comments. 

Cheers