| 释义 |
beg, borrow, or steal beg, borrow, or stealTo acquire or accomplish something by any means necessary or available. I don't care if you have to beg, borrow, or steal to get it, I want that car and I want it now! I'm in such a jam, I can't even beg, borrow, or steal the money I need to pay my rent this month.See also: stealbeg, borrow, or stealObtain by any possible means, as in You couldn't beg, borrow, or steal tickets to the Olympics. This term is often used in the negative, to describe something that cannot be obtained; Chaucer used it in The Tale of the Man of Law. [Late 1300s] See also: stealˌbeg, ˌborrow or ˈsteal (also ˌbeg, ˌsteal or ˈborrow) obtain something any way you can: We’ll have to beg, steal or borrow enough money to pay the fines.See also: borrow, stealbeg, borrow, or stealObtain in any possible way. This saying appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (The Tale of the Man of Law, ca. 1386): “Maugre [despite] thyn heed, thou most for indigence or stele, or begge, or borwe [borrow] thy despence [expenditure]!” In slightly different form it appears in a seventeenth-century poem with a cautionary moral that is quoted by Washington Irving (“But to beg or to borrow, or get a man’s own, ’tis the very worst world that ever was known”). Almost the same wording appeared in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (1742).See also: steal |