Dog in a manger?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Dog in a manger?

When Isabella confessed her feelings to Mrs Linton, her cry to me, for I was in the room with them, was:

“Is she sane?”

At this, Isabella kindled up.

“You’re a dog in the manger, Cathy, and desire no one to be loved but yourself!”

That assessment, stinging as it is, sums up the idiom in a nutshell. If you want to use it, make sure you use it correctly, i.e. in situations where the selfish dog, or person in question has no consideration for others, destroying something so that other people won’t be able to use it even though they themselves cannot use or cannot seem to benefit directly from the destruction.

Or maybe they can benefit in some bizarre sort of way, but that’s the point. People who behave like a dog in a manger are ultra-selfish and kind of bizarre.

One more example, a more recent one from the Web:

On July 17, 2003, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. House and Senate. The subject of WMD, of course, was on the front burner.

“If we are wrong, then we will have destroyed a threat that was at its least responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering,” Blair said. “I am confident history will forgive.”

Blair’s confidence is justified. History has forgiven U.K. leaders for plenty. How else, for example, could U.S. News and World Report have dubbed Winston Churchill “The Last Hero” in a 2000 cover story? In that article, Churchill was said to believe in “liberty, the rule of law, and the rights of the individual.”