Graveyard shift

    大夜班

    Graveyard是“墓地”，shift是“轮班”。这个短语是什么意思呢？请看对话：

    A: When did you go to bed last night? I saw a WeChat post you left at 2 a.m.

    B: I was working the graveyard shift last night, so I didn't go to sleep until this morning.

    Note: The graveyard shift, or graveyard watch, was the name coined for the work shift of the early morning, typically midnight until 8 a.m. The name originated in the United States at the latter end of the 1800s. There's no evidence that it had anything directly to do with watching over graveyards, merely that the shifts took place in the middle of the night, when the ambience was quiet and lonely. The "graveyard watch" version was normally used by sailors on watch. The graveyard link was made explicit in this definition, offered by the American mariner Gershom Bradford, in "A Glossary of Sea Terms," 1927: Graveyard watch, the middle watch or 12 to 4 a.m., because of the number of disasters that occur at this time.