toad: [OE] Toad is a mystery word, with no known relatives in any other Indo-European language. Of its derivatives, toady [19] is short for the earlier toad eater ‘sycophant’ [17]. This originated in the dubious selling methods of itinerant quack doctors. They employed an assistant who pretended to eat a toad (toads were thought to be poisonous), so that the quack could appear to effect a miraculous cure with his medicine.
The toad-eating assistant came to be a byword for ‘servility’ or ‘dependency’, and hence for ‘servile flattery’. Toadstools [14] were named for their stool-like shape, and also because of an association between poisonous fungi and the supposedly poisonous toad.
toad (n.)
c. 1300, from late Old English tadige, tadie, of unknown origin and according to OED with no known cognates outside English. Applied to loathsome persons from 1560s. Toad-strangler "heavy rain" is from 1919, U.S. Southern dialectal.
例文
1. He grabbed into the ooze and came up clutching a large toad .
彼は泥の中に手を入れてすくった結果、巨大なヒキガエルを捕まえた。
2.His eyes seemed to bulge like those of a toad .
彼の目はヒキガエルのように膨らんでいる。
3.Both the toad and frog are amphibian.
ヒキガエルもカエルも両生類である。
4.The toad had changed its colour to blend in with its new environment.
ヒキガエルは変色し、新しい環境と一体化している。
5.The Toad saw at once how wrongly and foolishly he had acted.