gadget: [19] Gadget is an elusive sort of word, as vague in its history as it is unspecific in its meaning. It seems to have originated as a piece of sailors’ slang, and is said to have been current as long ago as the 1850s, but the earliest record of it in print is from 1886, in R Brown’s Spun Yarn and Spindrift: ‘Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chickenfixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmeynoggy, or a wim-wom – just pro tem., you know’.
As for its source, suggestions have included French gachette ‘catch of a mechanism’ and French dialect gagée ‘tool’.
gadget (n.)
1886, gadjet (but said by OED corespondents to date from 1850s), sailors' slang word for any small mechanical thing or part of a ship for which they lacked, or forgot, a name; perhaps from French gachette "catch-piece of a mechanism" (15c.), diminutive of gache "staple of a lock." OED says derivation from gauge is "improbable."
例文
1. The gadget can be attached to any vertical surface.
この小物は垂直な表面に貼り付けることができます。
2.The gadget can be attached to any vertical or near vertical surface.
この装置は、垂直またはほぼ垂直な平面に装着できます。
3.The children were squabbling over the remote-control gadget for the television.
子供たちがテレビのリモコンを奪うために口論している。
4.The gadget is used to artificially inseminate cows.