| 词组 | pawn off |
| 释义 | pawn off This is a peculiar expression. None of the usual dictionaries of slang mentions it, and neither do any of the usual usage books except Harper 1985. Pawn off was called to Harper's attention by one of the usage panelists who sent in an advertisement from the New Yorker: We tell you this not because we are trying to pawn Countess Isserlyn [a cosmetic] off as a bargain. This is easy enough to interpret: it must mean "palm off" or "pass off" or "fob off." It would appear to have originated by similarity of sound to palm in palm off The OED thinks it erroneous for palm, but it may in fact be a dialectal variant. The use has been around for quite a long time. The OED has an example of pawn upon with the same meaning from 1787 and an example of pawn off from the novelist Captain Frederick Marryat in 1832. We have found an earlier example from Scotland. According to one 18th-century student's notes, Adam Smith, perhaps best known for The Wealth of Nations, used the phrase pawn upon in a lecture given on 14 January 1763: • The teller of wonderful or lamentable stories is disagreeable because he endeavours to pawn them upon us for true ones. Our files first show pawn off as part of a list in a 1920 work on verb-adverb combinations in English. An editor for Webster's Third slipped it into a definition written in 1956 (it was revised). Our earliest example in context dates from 1955: • I am not for a moment suggesting that our own dealers should pawn off inferior works by means of the same system —James Thrall Soby, Saturday Rev., 5 Feb. 1955 It has subsequently turned up here and there, but not with great frequency: • ... Manville pawns his wife off on Berlin so that he, Manville, is free to marry his offstage lover —Current Biography, January 1968 • ... the dumping grounds for what business cannot pawn off on more alert consumers —Ralph Nader, Who Speaks for the Consumer?, 1968 • ... I was still slightly shaken from the inverse cube law of gravity he'd pawned off on me last visit — Alan Lightman, Science 84, April 1984 This pawn (with over) seems to exist in Irish English too: • ... a couple of musty sweet cakes that would be pawned over on him by some of the shopkeepers — Arnold Schrier, Irish Digest, March 1956 Pawn off has been lurking just below the threshold of dictionary recognition (except for the OED) for quite a long time. If we count the early pawn upon, it's been in at least limited use for 200 years. |
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