こんな意味もあったの？ ― purchase

以前にも”こんな意味があったの？”という見出しで単語を取り上げたことがありますが、またまた不勉強をさらすようですが、今日も1つ勉強しました。

購入するという意味の動詞である”purchase”にこんな意味もあったのです。

少し長いですが、下記の引用を読んでみてください。


IMAGINE, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out e-mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It’s safe bet he never would have guessed that eight years later a multibillion-dollar lawsuit might hinge on whether he capitalized the word “Internet,” or whether he spelled “cannot” as one word or two.

But that is exactly the kind of stylistic minutiae being analyzed in a lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia, owner of a wood-pellet fuel company in upstate New York. Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mr. Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune. He has backed up his claim with e-mails purported to be from Mr. Zuckerberg, but Facebook’s lawyers argue that the e-mail exchanges are fabrications.

When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail -- or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author’s idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?
(Ben Zimmer. Decoding Your E-mail Personality. The New York Times. July 23, 2011.)


少し長いですが、最後の段落に出てくる”purchase”は明らかに動詞ではありません。また、”購入する”とか”買う”という動詞としての意味が頭にあると、名詞としても”購入”とか”買い物”といった訳語が思い浮かびがちですが、それではこの部分を解釈できません。

それで辞書を引くことになったわけですが、ここでの”purchase”は”足がかり”あるいは”手がかり”という日本語がふさわしいと思われます。

ランダムハウス英和辞書では、

((通例単数扱い))しっかりと握ること； しっかりとした足がかり； （車のタイヤが）滑らないで地面をとらえること

というエントリがあり、これが相当します。

実際の用法としては、

get a purchase on

という形が一般的です。


The splinters burrowed deeper, into her arm, but her attention was all on that waterwheel -- groan ing, roaring, thrashing the water below like a wounded water beast. Fingernails gripping the cloth of the child's shirt, Meredydd tried to get a purchase on the deck with her knees. The attempt only caused her to slip further over the edge.
(Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff. The Meri. 1992.)