英文字源與字彙Note week10

  Ø  John Donne

John Donne was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations.

•  No Man is an island

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING. by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,  

     And whisper to their souls to go,  

 Whilst some of their sad friends do say, 

     "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."                  

So let us melt, and make no noise, 

     No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ; 

 'Twere profanation of our joys  

     To tell the laity our love.  

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ; 

     Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 

 But trepidation of the spheres,  

     Though greater far, is innocent.  

Dull sublunary lovers' love  

     —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit  

 Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 

     The thing which elemented it.  

But we by a love so much refined, 

     That ourselves know not what it is,  

 Inter-assurèd of the mind,  

     Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,  

     Though I must go, endure not yet  

 A breach, but an expansion,  

     Like gold to aery thinness beat.  

If they be two, they are two so

     As stiff twin compasses are two ;  

 Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show  

     To move, but doth, if th' other do.  

And though it in the centre sit,  

     Yet, when the other far doth roam, 

 It leans, and hearkens after it,  

     And grows erect, as that comes home.  

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 

     Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; 

 Thy firmness makes my circle just,

     And makes me end where I begun.  

Mourn → to feel extremely sad because someone has died, and to express this in public  

Ø  Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

Ø  For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia. The novel is regarded as one of Hemingway's best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Farewell to Arms

Rebellion → an attempt to remove a government or leader by force

Ø  Grotesque statue

The word grotesque, originally a noun from Italian grottesco , literally "of a cave", from Italian grotta (see grotto). The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century. The word first was used of paintings found on the walls of basements of Roman ruins that were called at that time Le Grotte (The Grottoes) due to their appearance. 

Ø   3D 產業：dangerous dirty difficult

known as the 3Ds, is an American neologism derived from an Asian concept, and refers to certain kinds of labor often performed by unionized blue-collar workers. Typically, any task, regardless of industry, can qualify as a 3D job. These jobs can bring higher wages due to a shortage of willing qualified individuals and in many world regions are filled by migrant workers looking for higher wages

• bull’s eye → The small central circle on a target. (正中紅心)

Ø  Syllable

morph-： form

metamorphosis →  a major change that makes someone or something very different

author-：a writer (作者)

authority → someone who is considered an expert in a particular subject

con-：together

conspiracy → a secret plan by a group of people to do something bad or illegal, especially in politics

※conspiracy = plot

Plot as noun → a series of related events that make up the main story in a book, film etc. A second, less important story in the same book or film is called a subplot (情節)

Plot as verb → a secret plan (密謀)

 Pre-；pri：beginning

Premier → best, largest, or most important

Sym-：with；together

Symmetrical → balanced; the same on both sides

For example：The front of the church is completely symmetrical.

• video

• defend vs offender

defend →  to protect someone or something from attack

offender → someone who has committed a crime

→ sentence (v.) to death

西概Note week10

   Ø   Gospel (福音書)

A gospel is an account describing the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The most widely known examples are the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John which are included in the New Testament, but the term is also used to refer to apocryphal gospels, non-canonical gospels, Jewish-Christian gospels, and gnostic gospels. Christianity places a high value on the four canonical gospels, which it considers to be a revelation from God and central to its belief system. Christianity traditionally teaches that the four canonical gospels are an accurate and authoritative representation of the life of Jesus.

Ø  Tragedy 

Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in audiences. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.

From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Jean Racine, and Friedrich Schiller to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of August Strindberg; Samuel Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering; Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon; and Joshua Oppenheimer's incorporation of tragic pathos in his nonfiction film, The Act of Killing (2012), tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.  A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticized the genre.

• Three acient Greek tragedian

Ø  Aeschylus

Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian. He is also the first whose plays still survive; the others are Sophocles and Euripides. He is often described as the father of tragedy: critics and scholars' knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in theater to allow conflict among them, whereas characters previously had interacted only with the chorus.

At least one of his plays was influenced by the Persians' second invasion of Greece. This work, The Persians, is the only surviving classical Greek tragedy concerned with contemporary events (very few of that kind were ever written), and a useful source of information about its period. The significance of war in Ancient Greek culture was so great that Aeschylus' epitaph commemorates his participation in the Greek victory at Marathon while making no mention of his success as a playwright. Despite this, Aeschylus' work – particularly the Oresteia – is acclaimed by today's literary academics.

Ø  Sophocles

Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote 120 plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-fêted playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in 30 competitions, won 18, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won 14 competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles, while Euripides won 5 competitions.

The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and also Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, although each play was actually a part of a different tetralogy, the other members of which are now lost. Sophocles influenced the development of the drama, most importantly by adding a third actor, thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights.

Ø  Euripides

Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. He is one of the few whose plays have survived, with the others being Aeschylus, Sophocles, and potentially Euphorion. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.

Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

He was also unique among the writers of ancient Athens for the sympathy he demonstrated towards all victims of society, including women. His conservative male audiences were frequently shocked by the 'heresies' he put into the mouths of characters, such as these words of his heroine Medea.

• Ancient Greek Comedian

Ø  Aristophanes

Aristophanes was a comic playwright of ancient Athens.  His other plays provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are used to define the genre.

Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporarie.

His second play, The Babylonians (now lost), was denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. It is possible that the case was argued in court but details of the trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially The Knights, the first of many plays that he directed himself. "In my opinion," he says through the Chorus in that play, "the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all."

Ø  Youth (by Samuel Ullman)

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

Ø  Theatre

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. Elements of art and stagecraft are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek

Theatre (英式) vs Theater (美式)

Ø  Dionysus ( 5-day festival) (wine) (dithyramb) (play)

Dionysus is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in Greek mythology. Alcohol, especially wine, played an important role in Greek culture with Dionysus being an important reason for this life style. He is a major, popular figure of Greek mythology and religion, and is included in some lists of the twelve Olympians. Dionysus was the last god to be accepted into Mt. Olympus. He was the youngest and the only one to have a mortal mother. His festivals were the driving force behind the development of Greek theatre. Modern scholarship categorises him as a dying-and-rising god.

He is also called Eleutherios ("the liberator"), whose wine, music and ecstatic dance frees his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subverts the oppressive restraints of the powerful. Those who partake of his mysteries are possessed and empowered by the god himself. His cult is also a "cult of the souls"; his maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and he acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead.

•   Dithyramb

The dithyramb was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility.

Plutarch contrasted the dithyramb's wild and ecstatic character with the paean. According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of Athenian tragedy. A wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of writing is still occasionally described as dithyrambic.

英文字彙與字源學Note week9

Midterm exam

西概Note week9

Midterm exam

英文字彙與字源Note week8

Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction our mental life is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one's id may want to do.








Ø  Superego

A word used in Freudian psychology to refer to your conscience  (=the part of your mind that tells you what is right or wrong)

Ø  Snob勢利眼 (N.)

someone who thinks they are better than other people, usually because of their social class. This word shows that you do not like people like this.

Ø   Snobbish → behaving in a way that shows you think you are better than other people

Ø  Administration 管理團隊 政府

Ø   Ostentation: an unnecessary display of wealth, knowledge, etc., that is done to attract attention, admiration, or envy

Liabilities = equity (net worth)

西概Note week8

Hera

The wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function was as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow, lion and the peacock were considered sacred to her. 

Pygmalion ： the creator fall in love with his / her work (play)

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea first presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and the film of that name.

Galatea (mythology)

is a name popularly applied to the statue carved of ivory by Pygmalion of Cyprus, which then came to life, in Greek mythology; in modern English the name usually alludes to that story. Galatea is also the name of Polyphemus's object.

My fair lady


A misogynistic and snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.

• vanity fair (a magazine)
  
  
  
  

• vanity vanity all is vanity 

• Bicentennial Man (film)

Bicentennial Man is a 1999 American science fiction comedy-drama film.

Based on the novel The Positronic Man, co-written by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, which is itself based on Asimov's original novella titled The Bicentennial Man, the plot explores issues of humanity, slavery, prejudice, maturity, intellectual freedom, conformity, sex, love, and mortality.

Bi- ：two

1.          Bicentennial man

2.          bicycle

延伸 ：比馬龍效應

• Pygmalion effect

A better future higher expectations, they will show the phenomenon. . Pygmalion is a self-fulfilling prophecy development. In this view, the heart often with negative expectations of the people will fail; but the heart often with positive expectations of the people will succeed. In sociology, this effect is often cited and education or social class related.

• Paraphrase ：

A restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words. The term itself is derived via Latin paraphrasis from Greek παράφρασις, meaning "additional manner of expression". The act of paraphrasing is also called "paraphrasis".A paraphrase typically explains or clarifies the text that is being paraphrased. A paraphrase does not need to accompany a direct quotation, the paraphrase typically serves to put the source's statement into perspective or to clarify the context in which it appeared. A paraphrase is typically more detailed than a summary. One should add the source at the end of the sentence, 

l   Duty → a legal or moral obligation

For example：He has a duty under the terms of his contract to pay rent.

1.          be someone’s duty to do something: It is your duty as a parent to protect your children.

2.          owe/have a duty to someone: The company has a duty to its shareholders.

3.          sense of duty: He has a strong sense of family duty.

4.          do your duty: I was simply doing my duty as a good citizen.

l   Responsibility →the state or job of being in charge of someone or something and of making sure that what they do or what happens to them is right or satisfactory

For example：She has a lot of responsibility as a nurse.

1.          responsibility for: Overall responsibility for the school lies with the head teacher.

2.          have responsibility for (doing) something: You will have responsibility for sales and marketing.

3.          take responsibility for (doing) something: Would someone take responsibility for bringing Paul home?

4.          assume responsibility for (doing) something: Serrano immediately assumed temporary responsibility for foreign affairs.

5.          a position of responsibility: People in positions of responsibility cannot behave like this.

l   Obligation → something that you must do for legal or moral reasons

1.          have an obligation to someone/something: The firm has an obligation to its customers.

2.          obligation to do something: Buyers have no legal obligation to disclose personal financial information.

3.          meet/honour/fulfil an obligation: The council has failed to fullfil its statutory obligation to the public.

4.          without (any) obligation: Estimates are available on request, without obligation.

ü  Obligations 債務

ü  Duty free ：duty-free goods are cheaper than the usual price because you do not pay any tax on them.

• Syllable

voc- ; vok ：to call

1.          vocal → relating to the voice, or done with the voice

2.          invoke → to ask for help from someone who is stronger or more powerful, especially a god.

                     For example：Prayers invoking divine protection.

dic- ：to say; to tell a word

1.          dictator → someone who tells people what to do and refuses to listen to their opinions 

2.          dictionary → to tell the words meaning

man- hand

1. manipulation → influences someone or controls something in a clever or dishonest way
2. manuscript → a writer’s original pages of a book, article, or document before it is published
3. manual → a book containing instructions for doing something, especially for operating a machine

Pro- ：many; much; in favor of

1. propaganda → information, especially false information, that a government or organization spreads in order to influence people’s opinions and beliefs
2. protagonist →  the main character in a play, film, book, or story

Patron → someone who supports the work of writers, artists, musicians etc, especially by giving them money(主寶神)

St. Christophen (the patron god of travel)

Patron saint

Patronage (n.) (v.) → help or money that is given to a person or organization

(主顧關係) (政治酬庸)