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scavenger n. [SKAV-un-jer]

拾荒者，食腐动物，清除剂

Definition

1 chiefly British: a person employed to remove dirt and refuse from streets
1 主要用于英国：被雇佣来清除灰尘和垃圾的街道清洁工

2: one that scavenges: such as 做类似清洁工作的人，例如：
   a: garbage collector 垃圾收集者
   b: a junk collector 垃圾收集者
   c: a chemically active substance acting to make innocuous or remove an undesirable substance 一种具有化学活性的物质，用来做无害化处理或者去除不想要的物质。

3: an organism that typically feeds on refuse or carrion
3：通常以垃圾或腐肉为食的有机物

注：innocuous：无害的，无毒的，无关痛痒的；carrion：腐肉

Did You Know?

You might guess that scavenger is a derivative of scavenge, but the reverse is actually true; scavenger is the older word, first appearing in English in the early 16th century, and the back-formation scavenge came into English in the mid-17th century. Scavenger is an alteration of the earlier scavager, itself from Anglo-French scawageour, meaning “collector of scavage.” In medieval times, scavage was a tax levied by towns and cities on goods put up for sale by nonresidents in order to provide resident merchants with a competitive advantage. The officers in charge of collecting this tax were later made responsible for keeping streets clean, and that’s how scavenger came to refer to a public sanitation employee in Great Britain before acquiring its current sense referring to a person who salvages discarded items.

词根词源演化：scawageour (“collector of scavage”) —> scavager —> scavenger

你可能会猜测scavenger是由scavenge派生而来的，不过反过来才是事实。scavenger是更古老的词汇，在16世纪先出现在英语中，到了17世纪中期，才通过逆构法产生了动词scavenge。scavenger是早期单词scavager的变体，而scavager 又来自于盎格鲁法语(Anglo-French) scawageour（意思是“scavage税之税收者”）。在中世纪时期，scavage是一个税种，针对非本地居民的货物售卖，由市镇政府收取，这样做主要是为了保护本地商人的竞争优势。负责收取scavage税的官员同时也负责清理街道，这就是在英国scavenger也有“公共场所清洁工”的意思的来源，后来这个词用于指代拾荒者。

salvage：救助，打捞，抢救

Examples

My uncle, a habitual scavenger and clever handyman, found a broken exercise machine left on the curb and fixed it so that it works again.

我的叔叔，惯常的拾荒者和聪明的手工艺人，在路边发现了一个损坏了的健身器，然后把它修好继续使用。

注：habitual: 习惯的，惯常的； curb：路边，克制，勒马绳
“The 34-year-old scavenger has had to work longer and harder over the past year, underlining how a drastic decline in scrap metal and commodity prices has hurt even the poor who collect discarded metal to sell to scrap yards.”
— Brendan O’Brien, Reuters, 4 July 2016
在过去一年里，这位34岁的拾荒者不得不更长时间的努力工作，强调了垃圾金属与商品价格的快速下降是如何伤害甚至以捡废铁买到废品收购站为生的贫民的。

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