| 释义 |
Bell, n.5|bɛl|
[The name of the N. Amer. Bell System or Telephone Company (from the surname of Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), Scots-born American inventor of the telephone), part of AT&T and before divestiture in 1984 the major U.S. telephone company; cf. auntie n. b.]
Ma Bell, a familiar name for the Bell System (see quot. 1947), orig. applied somewhat wryly by its employees; similarly Mother Bell;and hence Baby Bell, any of the subsidiary regional U.S. telephone companies after divestiture.
1947Sat. Even. Post 10 May 16/1 [Bell Telephone Laboratories] is apparently interested in their every waking and sleeping hour—a maternal solicitude which is largely responsible for the title of Ma Bell. 1948Bell Telephone Mag. Winter 244/1 Mother Bell found that a lot of people wanted to work for her, even on a short-term basis. 1960Business Week 8 Oct. 98/1 This year Mother Bell has really lived up to her name; she's given birth to a whole brood of new telephonic devices for the home. 1962Look 29 Aug. 22/1 Sixty-four million [telephones] belong to the vast Bell System owned by the $24 billion American Telephone and Telegraph Company, known to its two million stockholders as AT&T, to its 781,000 employees as ‘Ma Bell’ and to at least one U.S. senator as ‘the greatest monopoly in the history of the earth’. 1973Fortune Feb. 130/3 As it has turned out, the quality of some phone lines is often below what Ma Bell promised. 1980Business Week 26 May 110/2 The computer industry has already started to call the prospective AT & T subsidiary ‘Baby Bell’, anticipating that it will be a powerful clone of its mother. 1980Forbes (N.Y.) 1 Sept. 6/3 Mother Bell is stepping up its efforts to keep foreign traffic humming without becoming a burden on the expense account. 1987L. D. Estleman Lady Yesterday xvii. 123 You can still find it in the Yellow Pages... Ma Bell knows. |