2021年10月24日 星期日

precondition, applicable, upside down, by dint of

Taiwan urges China to drop preconditions for talks on peace accord
International Herald Tribune - France
AP TAIPEI, Taiwan: Taiwan urged Chinese leaders Tuesday to dismantle hundreds of missiles and recognize the self-ruled island's separate identity before the ...


By dint of trial and error, with technical help from printmaking studios, she succeeded.




Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki dismissed the new sanctions as "unlawful" and said Iran wouldn't suspend its uranium work as a precondition to rejoining talks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran will "adjust" its ties with the U.N. members behind the measure.



Bill Moyers

“We need the courage to create ourselves daily — as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings,” she says. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable.”
Bill Moyers revisits a 1988 documentary in which he and Maya Angelou attended a conference on facing evil held in the Hill Country of central Texas.
BILLMOYERS.COM

dint (BECAUSE OF) 
noun FORMAL
by dint of as a result of:
She got what she wanted by dint of pleading and threatening.





For maybe in another world
Another time
Another town,
Maybe HE is right side up
And I am upside down.
--Shel Silverstein (rl 引)



upside down adverbadjective
having the part which is usually at the top turned to be at the bottom:
Turn the jar upside down and shake it.
The plane was flying upside down at high speed.

upside was found in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary at the entries listed below.

Upside down

Meaning
Turned so that the upper surface becomes the lower.
Origin
upside-down'Upside down' is one of a longish list of English expressions that refer to things being inverted or in disorder - 'topsy-turvy', 'head over heels' (even though that is the usual arrangement), '**** over tea-kettle' etc. The mediaeval English also had the terms 'overset', 'overtumble' and 'topset downe', which have now gone out of use. This profusion of similar phrases suggests a widespread interest in the recounting of stories of people falling over - matched today by the popularity of home video television shows.
tet-becheThe interest is common in other languages too; the French even have a specialist term for a sequence of stamps in which some are printed upside down - tête-bêche.
'Upside down' was originally 'up so down', i.e. 'up as if down'. The 'so' part migrated into various forms, 'upsa', 'upse' (which spawned 'upset') etc., in the same way as in phrases like 'ups-a-daisy' and 'upset the applecart'. The change from 'up so down' to forms like 'upset-down' and eventually 'upside-down' appear to be for no better reason than to make the expression's meaning more intuitive.
'Upside down' doesn't sound especially old but, in its early forms, it can claim to be one of the oldest expressions in English. It joins the handful of phrases that can be dated from the first part of the 14th century or before, for example, 'haven't slept a wink', 'in the twinkling of an eye', 'by dint of'. The earliest version of 'upside down' known in print is in The proces of the seuyn [seven] sages. The precise publication date of that text isn't known, but it is accepted as being before 1340:
"The cradel and the child thai found Up so doun upon the ground."
(Note: The '****' above is the upshot of the policy of many ISPs of blocking all mail which contains words that they have decided might give you a fit of the vapours. Apologies to the many subscribers who didn't get recent '**** and bull story' mailing.)

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precondition
 
noun [C] ━━ n. 前提条件. 先決條件
━━ vt. あらかじめ条件を整えておく.
something which must happen or be true before it is possible for something else to happen:
A halt to the fighting is a precondition for negotiations.


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