| 释义 |
yellow dog U.S.
1. A mongrel dog of a yellowish colour.
c1770T. Fairfax Compl. Sportsman 97 Yellow dogs, are those which have red hairs, inclining to brown. 1840Daily Pennant (St. Louis) Apr. 20 (Thornton Amer. Gloss.) One of those interesting animals, a yellow dog, with a bullet-hole through his breast. 1860O. W. Holmes Elsie V. iii, A ‘yallah dog’ is a large canine brute, of a dingy old-flannel colour, of no particular breed except his own. 1873M. Holley My Opinions 237 If I was a yeller dog, she couldn't seem to look down on me any more, and treat me any worse. 1895B. Harte Clarence iii. iii, In Illinois we wouldn't hang a yellow dog on that evidence.
2. fig.
a. A person or thing of no account or of a low type.
1881E. W. Nye Bill Nye & Boomerang 166 The presiding officer had lost control, and a surging crowd of yellow dogs had the floor. 1903Everybody's Mag. Oct. 562 In a cut-rate combination you are lucky if you get what you pay for. If there are five magazines in the combination, two of them are good. The rest are ‘yellow-dogs’. 1924A. J. Small Frozen Gold i. 44 Understand, I won't allow no yellow dog of a Siwash to step over me. 1975New Yorker 8 Dec. 126/2 Calling someone a yellow dog would not imply that the person so called was actually yellow and wagged his tail. It is just the sort of cultural misunderstanding that student-exchange programs were once expected to clear up.
b. attrib.; applied spec. to organizations, etc., opposed to trade unionism.
1894Kipling Day's Work (1898) 71 America's paved with the kind er horse you are—jist plain yaller-dog horse—waitin' ter be whipped inter shape. 1902― Just So Stories 92 Old Man Kangaroo is being rude to Yellow-Dog Dingo. Yellow-Dog Dingo has been trying to catch Kangaroo all across Australia. 1902Mine Workers' Jrnl. July 1 A yellow dog lease. 1903Outlook 15 Aug. 931/2 In preference to a Tammany ‘yellow dog’ ticket his organization would support the Fusion candidate. 1920Motorman & Conductor Oct. 34 A yellow dog contract. 1930Sun (Baltimore) 6 May 12/2 The ‘yellow dog’ contract, requiring men to barter away their right to organize as the price of a job. 1956Mag. of Fantasy & Sci. Fiction Oct. 32/2 It was the latest form of the yellow-dog clause, one in which the employee agrees to refrain from engaging in a competing occupation for five years by letting his former employers pay him cash to option his services on a first-refusal basis. 1976Amer. N. & Q. XIV. 136/1 The committee scrutinized the records and books of the four major New York companies uncovering the existence of the so-called ‘yellow dog funds’. |