Happy as a Sandboy 为什么是开心的意思呢?

Happy as a Sandboy

Sandboy: As happy as a sandboy is an expression which implies blissful contentment. I believe that the saying is truly Bristolian in origin. On Bathurst basin, in the City centre is the long established Ostrich Inn. The Inn is immediately adjacent to the Redcliff caves which, in their day, were a prime source of sand. Past landlords of the Inn used to send little boys ie Sandboys into the caves to collect sand to spread on the floor of the Inn to soak up the beer and ale droppings (much like butchers used to put sawdust on the floor of their shops). The Sandboys were paid for their efforts in beer. They were indeed happy.

中英文

我们以前向大家介绍过词组Happy as Larry和happy as a pig in mud，都有“非常开心”的含义。今天我们再来学习一个词组happy(jolly) as a sand boy，像卖沙子的人一样无比快乐。

　　Happy as a sand boy是一条英国谚语，其起源可以追溯到19世纪初期。其实sand boy不一定专指卖沙子的“小男孩”，因为在过去，boy多为对社会地位较低的成年人的爱称，因此sand boy多半指代那些为谋生计，挨家挨户叫卖沙子的成年人。卖沙子今天听起来有些好笑，但在19世纪确实是一项有利可图的买卖，人们需要沙子来打磨地板，吸收水渍，很多小酒馆还流行用沙子来铺地，营造一种舒适浪漫的效果。

　　那么这些卖沙子的穷人为什么这么快乐呢？一种可能是：他们贩卖的货物是不需要多少本钱的，只要找到一块干净的沙地，就有了充足的免费货源，因此他们每赚到一点钱都非常开心。

　　另一种理论来自一种传说：卖沙子的人对酒精有特殊的偏好。19世纪的英国著名现实主义小说家查尔斯·迪更斯在他1841年的小说《老古玩店》（The Old Curiosity Shop）中描写了一个叫“The Jolly Sandboys”的酒馆，门口挂着一个标志牌，上面画着三个卖沙人举着大杯啤酒开怀畅饮，看上去非常开心。

　　然而，到了19世纪中期，锯屑逐渐取代了沙子，成为酒馆和商店风行的铺地用品，所以sand boy们就无法再像以前那么开心了。

中英文

看看国外专家对sandboy的解释

[Q] From Niki Wessels, South Africa; a related question came from Robert Metcalf in Singapore: “Our family recently discussed the expression happy as a sandboy, and wondered where and how it originated. My dictionary informs me that a sandboy is a kind of flea — but why a boy, and why is it happy?”

[A] Let me add an explanatory note to your question, as American readers have probably never heard this saying. It is mostly known in Britain and the Commonwealth, though it is not so common these days even in those countries. The first examples we know about are from London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Another form current at the time was as jolly as a sandboy. Both are proverbial sayings that suggest a carefree and untroubled state of mind.

None of my reference works hint at a connection with fleas (sand fleas exist, of course, but they hardly seem relevant). However, a writer in Notes & Queries in 1866, answering much the same query as yours, comments that: “Sandboy is the vulgar name of a small insect which may be found in the loose sand so common on the seashore. This insect hops and leaps in a manner strongly suggestive of jollity, and hence I imagine the simile arises”. So your dictionary is part-right: it was once a colloquial or dialect word for a sand flea.

The usual explanation is mundane in the extreme: sandboys sold sand. The word boy here was a common term for a male worker of lower class (as inbellboy, cowboy, and stableboy), which comes from an old sense of a servant. It doesn’t imply the sellers were necessarily young, though one early description does mention urchins doing the selling. There’s no link, by the way, with the sandman, the personification of sleep, which came into English several decades later in translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories.

The selling of sand wasn’t such a peculiar occupation as you might think, as there was once quite a need for it. It was used to scour pans and tools and was sprinkled on floors. By the time that Henry Mayhew wrote about it in hisLondon Labour and the London Poor in 1861 he had to say that “The trade is inconsiderable to what it was, saw-dust having greatly superseded it in the gin-palace, the tap-room, and the butcher’s shop”. The sand was dug out from pits on Hampstead Heath and taken down in horse-drawn carts to be hawked through the streets. Early records also supply an image of sandboys selling their wares from panniers carried on donkeys.

The job was hard work and badly paid. Mayhew records these comments from one of the excavators on Hampstead Heath: “My men work very hard for their money, sir; they are up at 3 o’clock of the morning, and are knocking about the streets, perhaps till 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening”.

Their prime characteristic, it seems, was an inexhaustible desire for beer. Charles Dickens referred to the saying, already by then proverbial, in The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841: “The Jolly Sandboys was a small road-side inn of pretty ancient date, with a sign, representing three Sandboys increasing their jollity with as many jugs of ale”. A writer in Appleton’s Journal in the USA in 1872 remarked that the saying presumably arose because “as sand-boys follow a very dry and dusty trade, they are traditionally believed to require a great deal of liquor to moisten their clay”.

Quite so. But I suspect that the long hours and hard work involved in carrying and shovelling sand, plus the poor returns, meant that sandboys didn’t have much cause to look happy in the normal run of things, improving only when they’d had a pint or two, when they became tipsily cheerful. My guess is that at first the saying was meant ironically. Only when the trade of sandboy had died out around the middle of the century could it be taken as a figurative reference to happiness. Certainly, to judge from the answers to the question inNotes & Queries in 1866, even by then its origin was obscure.