bud, bemused, jolly, hostages to the future

A Not-So-Jolly Season for eBay

EBay is suffering a slide in visitor traffic and deteriorating sales as customers leave for fixed-priced sites where eBay has less of an edge.

Grand said she liked the idea of a treasure hunt because it “sounded rather jolly.”


bud (PLANT PART) Show phonetics
noun [C]
a small part of a plant, that develops into a flower or leaf

bud
verb [I] -dd-
to produce buds:
The unusually cold winter has caused many plants to bud late this year.
1.
n. - 芽, 花蕾, 葉芽, 萌芽, 未成熟的事物
v. intr. - 發芽, 抽芽, 啄食嫩芽, 開始生長
v. tr. - 使發芽, 接, 發芽生出
2.
n. - 小孩, 少女


n.

1. Botany.
   1. A small protuberance on a stem or branch, sometimes enclosed in protective scales and containing an undeveloped shoot, leaf, or flower.
   2. The stage or condition of having buds: branches in full bud.
2. Biology.
   1. An asexual reproductive structure, as in yeast or a hydra, that consists of an outgrowth capable of developing into a new individual.
   2. A small, rounded organic part, such as a taste bud, that resembles a plant bud.
3. One that is not yet fully developed: the bud of a new idea.

v., bud·ded, bud·ding, buds. v.intr.

1. To put forth or produce buds: a plant that buds in early spring.
2. To develop or grow from or as if from a bud: “listened sympathetically for a moment, a bemused smile budding forth” (Washington Post).
3. To be in an undeveloped stage or condition.
4. To reproduce asexually by forming a bud.

v.tr.

1. To cause to put forth buds.
2. To graft a bud onto (a plant).

[Middle English budde.]

budder bud'der n.
bud² (bŭd)
n. Informal.
Friend; chum. Used as a form of familiar address, especially for a man or boy: Move along, bud.

[Short for BUDDY.]

Wikipedia article "Bud".
━━ n. 芽, つぼみ; 未成熟な人［物］; 【動・解】芽体(がたい), 芽状突起.
come into bud　芽を出す.
in bud　芽を出して［た］.
in the bud　芽のうちで［に］; 初期に.
━━ v. （-dd-） 発芽する［させる］; 【園芸】…に［を］芽接ぎする.
bud・ding　━━ a., n. 発育期の; 新進の, 有望な; 【生物】出芽 ((無性生殖の1つの型)); 【植】芽接ぎ法.




in bud
covered with buds:
It was springtime and the fruit trees were in bud.
nip sth in the bud
to stop something before it has an opportunity to become established:
Many serious illnesses can be nipped in the bud if they are detected early enough.
It's important to nip this kind of bullying in the bud.

Bud ━━ n. 〔話〕 ＝Budweiser.

"譯場（su）報告" * On Translating *
No.40, 2008年3月11日； 2008/1/28 創刊

The buds are tree's hostages to the future- the promise a tree makes to itself that there will be a tomorrow, another year. "芽苞是樹木對未來的抵押 -- 樹木用芽苞答應日自己還有明天，還有來年。 (1984年5月的讀者文摘 （頁105） ) *hc案：參考：hostage to fortune 也許作者筆誤或想創更”現代”的表示。

Miao/Liang>樹木用芽苞許自己一個明天，許自己一個來年。

rl：「蓓蕾者，草木未來所依歸也──草木以其自許有來日，有來年，更有來生。」

pr：「芽苞者，樹木賭自己有明天也。」

「bud 有需要翻譯成『芽苞』兩字嗎？"芽"即可乎？」

芽（苞）？

「樹只是「集合」
君不見此刻櫻花「樹」的盛景乎？」

「苞等有點含糊
"花蒂上包著未開花朵的小葉片。如：「含苞待放」。" 即 它是"葉"現在沒空google"芽苞"用法 或許是....
"芽(蕾)"更好？」

We are not bemused

Or are we? A word's dueling meanings

By Jan Freeman November 16, 2008

DURING THE PAST year of political reporting, a lot of writers have thought bemused was just the right word for Barack Obama's benign, unruffled presence, especially in the debates with John McCain.

"Mr. Obama maintained a placid and at times bemused demeanor . . . as he parried the attacks," reported the New York Times, one of dozens of newspapers and magazines, in the United States and abroad, to use the B-word this way.
And now, all that bemusing has attracted the notice of several usage watchers - traditionalists who think that use of bemused, ubiquitous though it is, should not be accepted as standard English.
Merrill Perlman, who writes the Language Corner column for the Columbia Journalism Review, posted an entry on bemused several weeks ago, objecting to the sentence "Obama shrugged off McCain's attacks with a bemused smile."
"If the last six months of Nexis citations are any guide," she wrote, "more than half the people reading this think, as the above writers did, that 'bemused' means something like 'amused.' But it doesn't." Perlman, formerly director of copy desks at the Times, believes that "unless Obama was 'confused,' or 'muddled,' or 'puzzled,' he was not 'bemused.' "
A couple of days after the election, Russell Smith of the Toronto Globe and Mail seconded Perlman's advice. "Bemused means puzzled or confused," he wrote. "It comes from the idea of being taken by a muse. It's not necessarily a laughing state."
And last week, at the Times's usage blog, After Deadline, deputy news editor Philip Corbett joined the parade, noting half a dozen uses of bemused in his paper that he found mysterious. In one description of Obama, he said, "we seemed to mean something like 'above it all, with a trace of amusement' - but that's not what 'bemused' means."
Then again, maybe it is. As Perlman concedes, Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary (2003) lists the disputed meaning as bemuse's most recent sense: "to cause to have feelings of wry or tolerant amusement."
As for the derivation of bemused, Smith's "taken by a muse" has a grain of truth - but the story is much more complicated. As Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage explains, bemuse was first used by Alexander Pope, in 1705: "Poets . . . are irrecoverably be-Mused." But this looks like a pun: Poets are seized by the Muse, one of the Greek goddesses of the arts; and they are thus inspired to muse - to meditate, comtemplate, and wonder. (The Greek muse and the English verb are etymologically unrelated.)
Thirty years later, Pope used the word again, in a poem complaining that his fame was drawing would-be poets to his door - people like "A parson, much bemused in beer/ a maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer,/ a clerk, foredoomed his father's soul to cross . . ."
That "bemused in beer" suggested "drunk" to many readers. But the Merriam-Webster editors demur: "It seems quite likely that Pope is suggesting that the parson found his muse in beer. A parson who is simply muddled by beer" - rather than inspired by it - "would not make much sense in the larger context."
Dictionaries, however, soon began recording bemused as "a term of contempt" meaning "to muddle or stupefy," with drink or otherwise. Pope's own phrase, "bemused in beer," apparently faded from use, but an 1890 slang dictionary records that it enjoyed a sudden revival in the mid-19th century: "In America, especially, it caught the popular fancy and ran a brief but riotous course throughout the Union to signify one who addicted himself to 'soaking' with beer."
Then, starting in the mid-20th century, bemused increasingly took on the sense it so often has now - "quizzical, curiously and detachedly amused." This is no great leap, given that its sister verbs, amuse and muse, once could mean "distract, puzzle, occupy" and "wonder, marvel": "Women are so much amuzed with the management at home," wrote a 1689 observer who surely did not mean those women were entertained.

Corbett at the Times argues that the blurring of bemused dulls what should be a precise tool for "the careful writer." This hardly seems to apply here, however, since the word's meaning has been obscure during much of its existence. It would be convenient if bemused settled down to a dominant sense, as it seems to be doing. But except for the beery era, it's hard to point to an earlier time in which one unambiguous sense reigned.
These days, with amuse limited to jolly contexts, we need a word like bemused to convey wry puzzlement far more than we need it as another synonym for "drunk." And if, as Perlman suggests, more than half of the CJR's readers and half of the journalists on the Nexis database think bemused means "quizzical, wryly amused," then isn't that - by definition, as it were - what it does mean?

jolly (ATTRACTIVE)
adjective
bright and attractive:
I love the bright yellow you've painted the children's room - it makes it look really jolly.

jolly (ENJOYABLE) Adjective OLD-FASHIONED
enjoyable and lively:
a jolly occasion
We spent a very jolly evening together, chatting and drinking.