et cetera, et cetera 英文人行道: peter out, dwindle, nonelite, convey, Morning without YOU is a dwindled dawn. Dwindling Ammunition Stocks Pose Grave Threat to Ukraine

2024年4月5日星期五

peter out, dwindle, nonelite, convey, Morning without YOU is a dwindled dawn. Dwindling Ammunition Stocks Pose Grave Threat to Ukraine

Dwindling Ammunition Stocks Pose Grave Threat to Ukraine

What few munitions remain are often mismatched with battlefield needs as the country’s forces gird for an expected Russian offensive this summer.

China's Wuhan Prepares To Emerge From Lockdown As New Cases Dwindle
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1_The International New York Times eReplica Edition - International New York Times Asia - 29 Mar...

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太陽花學運廣告以「Democracy at 4am」(在凌晨4點的民主)為主題，並以美國詩人埃米莉．狄更生詩詞「Morning without YOU is a dwindled dawn」(沒有你的清晨是黯淡的黎明)為副標，提出太陽花學運的民主訴求。（施旖婕／綜合報導）

網友「Jate Cheng」轉貼太陽花學運刊登在《紐約時報》國際亞洲版上的廣告。翻自「Jate Cheng」臉書

太陽花學運廣告以「Democracy at 4am」(在凌晨4點的民主)為主題，並以美國詩人埃米莉．狄更生詩詞「Morning without YOU is a dwindled dawn」(沒有你的清晨是黯淡的黎明)為副標，提出太陽花學運的民主訴求。（施旖婕／綜合報導）

THE DWINDLING POWER OF A COLLEGE DEGREE
Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor's degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability. To get a good job, you have to have some special skill - charm, by the way, counts - that employers value. But there's also a pretty good chance that by some point in the next few years, your boss will find that some new technology or some worker overseas can replace you. The article was in The New York Times Magazine.

Taiwan Chip Firms Shift Strategy

Taiwan's chip makers are fighting dwindling market share by shifting their focus away from DRAM to NAND flash memory.

peter out
Dwindle or diminish and come to an end, as in Their enthusiasm soon petered out. The origin of this usage is unknown, but one authority suggests it may refer to the apostle Peter, whose enthusiastic support of Jesus quickly diminished so that he denied knowing him three times during the night after Jesus's arrest. [Mid-1800s]

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Origin
The earliest known use of peter as a verb meaning dwindle relates to the mining industry in the USA in the mid 19th century, and it is reasonable to accept that that is where it originated. Thoughts of US mining at that date bring to mind images of the California Gold Rush, which is sometimes suggested as the source of this phrase. The earliest uses of the word in that context come from later, for example, this piece from the Wisconsin newspaper the Milwaukee Daily Gazette, December 1845, which pre-dates the California rush (although there was an earlier Georgia Gold Rush in 1829). The story concerns an old prospector who is comparing his dwindling life circumstances with his diminishing finds of the mineral galena (lead sulphide):

"When my mineral petered why they all Petered me. Now it is dig, dig, dig, drill, drill for nothing. My luck is clean gone - tapered down to nothing."

There are several other records of the use of 'petering' to refer to dwindling mining reserves in 1840s USA, although none of these explicitly uses the phrase 'peter out'. For such a reference we have to wait for a figurative usage in the American lawyer and writer Henry Hiram Riley's collection of articles - Puddleford and its People, 1854:

"He hoped this 'spectable meeting warn't going to Peter-out."

While the root source of 'peter out' is fairly certainly mining, there's no clear understanding of why the word 'peter' was chosen in this context. As always, when an etymology is uncertain, people like to guess.
'Peter' has many meanings, both as a noun and a verb, and so the speculations are wide-ranging. They include a suggestion of a link to Saint Peter and to the story that his faith in Jesus faded when he denied him before his crucifixion. Another is an allusion to the French word péter (to break wind - literally to explode, but also used figuratively to mean fizzle), as in the phrase péter dans la main, meaning 'to come to nothing'. Of all of the proposed derivations of the word 'peter' in the idiom 'peter out', the one that best stands up to scrutiny is that is comes from saltpetre (potassium nitrate). This mineral was a constituent of the gunpowder that was used as an explosive in mining and was also used to make fuses. Saltpetre is at least associated with something that miners would have known something about, i.e. mining, as opposed to theology or French quotations.

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