Johnny语法博客：临阵退缩(转载)

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A. Did John talk to the boss about getting a raise?
　　约翰跟老板谈了加薪的事吗？
　　B. No, he got cold feet in the end.
　　没有，他最后临阵退缩了。
　　There are a few suggestions about where it comes from, one of them being that soldiers who were too frightened to fight used to claim that they couldn’t fight because their feet were frozen.
　　有几种起源的说法，一种是太害怕打仗的士兵说他们不能打仗，因为他们的脚冻结了。另一个说法曾经用来描述穷人，他们是如此贫穷，买不起鞋（所以脚冷），当时一个赌徒想要回下注的东西，作为借口说他没钱了（脚冷），实际上是他崩溃了。
　　The other suggestion is that the expression was once used to describe poor people, who were so poor that they couldn’t afford shoes (and so had cold feet), this was then used as an excuse by gamblers who wanted to back out of a bet and used the excuse that they had run out of money (‘had cold feet’), when really they had just lost their nerve.
　　I actually think we use ‘lost his/her nerve’ more commonly now than ‘got cold feet’. We can also use ‘freak out’, as in ‘he freaked out’, which means that he got so scared or angry about something that he went a bit crazy, but this expression is very colloquial so I wouldn’t use it in the workplace!
　　我实际上认为我们使用“他、她崩溃了”比用“临阵退缩”的多。我们还可以使用’抓狂’，如’他抓狂了’，这意味着他很害怕，他有点疯狂愤怒，但是这种说法十分口语化，所以我不会在工作场所使用！
　　（来源：www.englishonline.org.cn）