名声扫地

    Mud是“泥巴”，one’s name is mud是什么意思呢？请看对话：

    A: Can I ask a day off Friday?

    B: Of course, if you have a good enough reason.

    A: The kids have been asking again when we’re going to Disney World Orlando. I did promise them last summer that I’d take them. Now that this summer vacation is nearing its end, I have to honor my word. If they don’t get to go, my name will be mud.

    Note: This idiom means “one is in trouble or humiliated.” There’s an old story that the expression derives from Dr. Samuel Mudd, who unwisely took pity on Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Mudd treated the broken ankle Booth suffered in his leap to the stage of Ford’s Theater; for his trouble, he was sentenced to life in prison. But the phrase first appeared in print in 1820, 45 years before Lincoln’s assassination. It probably originates in another obscure bit of English slang — “mud” was an 18th century equivalent of “dope.”