| 释义 |
cat's-cradle
Also cat-cradle.
[Origin probably fanciful: the guess that it ‘may have been’ cratch-cradle is not founded on facts.]
A children's game in which two players alternately take from each other's fingers an intertwined cord so as always to produce a symmetrical figure.
1768Tucker Lt. Nat. (1852) I. 388 An ingenious play they call cat's cradle; one ties the two ends of a packthread together, and then winds it about his fingers, another with both hands takes it off perhaps in the shape of a gridiron, the first takes it from him again in another form, and so on alternately changing the packthread into a multitude of figures whose names I forget, it being so many years since I played at it myself. 1823Lamb Elia, Christ's Hosp. 326 Weaving those ingenious parentheses called cat-cradles. 1867Trollope Chron. Barset II. lxvii. 246 Old Mr. Harding..was in bed playing cat's-cradle with Posy.
attrib.1824Edin. Rev. XL. 84 One of those cats-cradle reasoners who never see a decided advantage in any thing but indecision. 1887Pall Mall G. 29 Sept. 3/2 The senseless accidents, and cat's-cradle plots of old romance. |