pander

英文詞源

pander

pander: [16] Pandaro was a character in Boccaccio’s Filostrato. He was the cousin of Cressida, and acted as go-between in her affair with Troilus. Chaucer took him over in his Troilus and Criseyde as Pandarus, changing him from cousin to uncle but retaining his role. His name came to be used as a generic term for an ‘arranger of sexual liaisons’ (‘If ever you prove false to one another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goersbetween be call’d to the world’s end after my name: call them all Panders’, says Pandarus in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida 1606), and by the mid-16th century was already well on the downward slope to ‘pimp, procurer’.

Its modern use as a verb, meaning ‘indulge’, dates from the 19th century.

pander (n.)

"arranger of sexual liaisons, one who supplies another with the means of gratifying lust," 1520s, "procurer, pimp," from Middle English Pandare (late 14c.), used by Chaucer ("Troylus and Cryseyde"), who borrowed it from Boccaccio (who had it in Italian form Pandaro in "Filostrato") as name of the prince (Greek Pandaros), who procured the love of Cressida (his niece in Chaucer, his cousin in Boccaccio) for Troilus. The story and the name are medieval inventions. Spelling influenced by agent suffix -er.

pander (v.)

"to indulge (another), to minister to base passions," c. 1600, from pander (n.). Related: Pandered; pandering.