2016年1月2日星期六

square off, propel, propel sb into/to/towards sth, Back to square one, stick with sth/sb,

It's us against them. And them. And maybe them. Too many countries spoil a war. Syria

John McCain, Sarah Palin Back Together Again
The long-time Arizona senator will square off against former Congressman JD Hayworth in the state's Republican primary.

Until recently, those who studied the rise of hookup culture had generally assumed that it was driven by men, and that women were reluctant participants, more interested in romance than in casual sexual encounters. But there is an increasing realization that young women are propelling it, too.

直到最近，那些研究勾搭文化兴起的人们还普遍以为这种文化是由男性驱动的，女性们的参与并非情愿，她们更喜欢浪漫而不是随便的性生活。但越来越多的人意识到，年轻女性对这种文化的发展也起到了推波助澜的作用。

Climate moves by US, China propel India to action
Washington Post
By Rama Lakshmi NEW DELHI -- Recent pledges by the United States and China to cut carbon emissions are now propelling India to make its own commitment to ...

The Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times each lead Congress' late-night progress toward agreement on an economic bailout plan on Saturday. Yesterday's talks were propelled by the need to act swiftly, and focused on adding strict oversight to the $700 billion as well as exploring new ways to pay for the measure that would avoid sticking taxpayers with the bill.

stick with sth/sb phrasal verb INFORMAL
to continue doing something or using someone to do work for you, and not stopping or changing to something or someone else:
He said that he was going to stick with the traditions established by his grandfather.
He's a good car mechanic - I think we should stick with him.

Back to square one

Meaning

Back to the beginning, to start again.

Origin

'Back to square one' is a classic of folk etymology. Although the origin is uncertain, no uncertainty lurks in the minds of those who are sure they know how, where and when it was derived. It ranks up there with 'the whole nine yards' and 'posh' as an expression that people 'know' the origin of, when in fact they don't.

There are three widely reported suggestions as to the phrase's origin: BBC sports commentaries, board games like Snakes and Ladders and playground games like hopscotch. Let's examine them in turn:

BBC Commentaries:

Ask a group of people about the origin of 'back to square one' and it won't be long before you are told that it originated with BBC football commentaries.
Early BBC radio commentaries did try and help listeners follow the progress of football and rugby games by notionally dividing the pitch into eight rectangles. Commentators described the play by saying which 'square' the ball was in. The Radio Times, the BBC's listings guide, referred to the practice in an issue from January 1927.
Commentaries that used a numbering system certainly happened and prints of the pitch diagrams still exist. Recordings of early commentaries also exist, including the very first broadcast sports commentary of any kind - a rugby match, as it happens. That commentary, and many others that followed, referred listeners to the printed maps and a second commentator called out the numbers as the ball moved from square to square. However, at no point in any existing commentary do they use the phrase 'back to square one'.
Despite this, the BBC issued a piece in a January 2007 edition of The Radio Times that celebrated 80 years of BBC football commentary. In this, the football commentator John Murray stated with confidence that "Radio Times' grids gave us the phrase 'back to square one'" and that "the grid system was dropped in the 1930s (not before the phrase 'back to square one' had entered everyday vocabulary)". This confidence is despite the fact that, although it could be true, it is nothing but conjecture.
What counts against the radio commentaries being the source is:

- The 'squares' are in fact rectangles.
- Square One isn't in any sense the beginning in a football game. All of the other seven squares - sorry, rectangles - have just as good a claim to be starting points.
- Perhaps the most damning evidence is that the phrase isn't known before 1952. That's many years after the BBC abandoned the use of visual aids for radio sports commentaries.

Board Games:

Other sources report that the phrase refers to Snakes and Ladders or similar board games. The earliest citation of the phrase in print is currently 1952, from theEconomic Journal:

"He has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders."
Despite that comment, it isn't a feature of Snakes and Ladders that players are sent back to square one. Of the many examples of such boards that exist, only a few have a snake in the first square. For the phrase to have come from that source people must have had occasion to use it, and that appears not to be the case with Snakes and Ladders.

Hopscotch

This playground game is played on a grid of numbered squares. The precise rules of the game vary from place to place but it usually involves players hopping from square to square, missing out the square containing their thrown stone. They go from one to (usually) eight or ten and then back to square one.
The game's name derives from 'scotch', which was used from the 17th century to denote a line scored on the ground and, of course, hopping. It was referred to in the 1677 edition of Robert Winstanley's satirical almanac Poor Robin:

"The time when School-boys should play at Scotch-hoppers."

Each of the above three explanations is plausible enough to gain supporters. As is usual with phrases of uncertain origin, most people are happy to believe the first explanation they hear. There's no real evidence to put the origin beyond reasonable doubt, and so it remains uncertain.

Whatever the source, 1952 is surprisingly late as the earliest printing for a phrase that was certainly in the spoken language much earlier than that and there are many hearsay examples from at least thirty years earlier. Perhaps a printed source from before 1952 will yield the truth?

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2016年1月2日 星期六