| 词组 | discover, invent |
| 释义 | discover, invent The original meaning of invent in English is "to come upon, find, discover," a meaning quite close to the meaning of the Latin word from which it was taken. Toward the end of the 18th century this original sense was decreasing in use, while two newer senses—still in use today—were flourishing. The OED has a citation from the Scots rhetorician Hugh Blair in 1783 that is probably the first discrimination between invent and discover, whose current sense was taking the place of invent's original sense: • We invent things that are new; we discover what was before hidden. Galileo invented the telescope; Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood —Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 1783 What Blair was doing, in effect, was distinguishing a current sense of invent from a current sense of discover which was in competition with a dying sense of invent (it is now archaic). Blair's book was widely used in schools. Perhaps Noah Webster was familiar with it from its use as a textbook. At any rate he included Blair's discrimination in his 1828 dictionary: Discover differs from invent. We discover what before existed, though to us unknown; we invent what did not before exist. Noah changed Blair's "what was before hidden" to "what before existed, though to us unknown" in the explanation of discover. He may have thought this a sharper point of discrimination than Blair's wording. It has since become the only point of dispute. Webster's discrimination has become a regular part of school textbooks and handbooks. Here is a modern example: • Discover means "to find something existing that was not known before." Invent means "to create" or "to originate."—Battles et al. 1982 And here is an older one: • A person discovers a thing already existing but hitherto unknown; he invents something entirely new — MacCracken & Sandison 1917 Now, if we look at typical examples given to show the distinction, we find: • Marie Curie discovered radium. Edison invented'the phonograph. But does anyone write "Marie Curie invented radium" or "Edison discovered the phonograph"? Probably not, unless the writer is trying for humor from incongruity. The plain fact is that no one with a school child's command of the language confuses these two words used in such an obvious way. But look at this: • Newton invented the differential and the integral calculus and discovered the laws of motion. I might perhaps have said that he discovered the calculus and invented the laws of motion, for the distinction between "discovery" and "invention," which used to be so carefully drilled into us at school, is not so sharp in the upper strata of mathematics and physics —K. K. Darrow, Renaissance of Physics, 1936 What Professor Darrow was questioning is the appropriateness of Noah Webster's "what before existed" to the conditions of abstract physics and mathematics. We don't need to dally in the upper strata of mathematics and physics to discover that if Noah's comment was apropos in 1828 it no longer is in the 20th century. • We shall never know who first discovered how to pound up metal-bearing rock and heat it in the fire —Tom Wintringham, The Story of Weapons and Tactics, 1943 • ... two brothers named Roberts discovered that it was possible to apply a coating of dissolved rubber to silk fabric and thereby secure an airtight covering —The Encyclopedia Americana, 1943 • Long before vaccination was discovered, attempts had been made to lessen the ravages of smallpox — Victor Heiser, An American Doctor's Odyssey, 1936 • It was discovered how to hollow out logs to provide a vessel of some stability and lightness for water transport. The canoe was invented —E. Adamson Hoebel, Man in the Primitive World, 1949 None of the processes above can really be said to have existed before. Yet invent cannot be used in place of discover in any of the sentences. The reason is syntactical: discover can take a noun, clause, or how to phrase as its object, but invent takes only a noun. Thus in many cases the distinction between the two words will be entirely grammatical, without Noah's semantic considerations entering the question at all. And when a noun is the direct object? Here we find some disputed usages: • The material was discovered in 1954 by Goodrich-Gulf scientists —N. Y. Times, 16 Oct. 1956 • A number of drug companies that hope to discover new medicines are synthesizing variants of the THC molecule —Solomon H. Snyder, Psychology Today, May 1971 The first of these examples refers to a synthetic rubber, and was criticized in Winners & Sinners on the basis of Noah Webster's then 128-year-old "what before existed." But it is a good idea to remember that even Noah did not make this criterion part of his definition— it was simply part of a word discrimination. His definition of this sense of discover reads: • To find out; to obtain the first knowledge of; to come to the knowledge of something sought or before unknown. • Nothing in the definition suggests discover is inapplicable to synthetic rubber—a substance undreamt of in 1828. The second example contains an important clue. We have learned a lot more about inventing than was known when Blair and Webster were alive. We now know, for instance, that inventions may have unexpected consequences. Many an inventor who has set out to invent a specific thing has wound up with something that has an entirely different application. A man who hoped to invent an artificial substitute for quinine actually produced the first artificial dye. In other words, he invented a substance and discovered that it had an entirely different use. The same result can occur when scientists synthesize or invent new compounds in hopes of discovering new medicines. Discover can suggest serendipity or surprise: • After trying hundreds of hydrocarbons on several mosquito species, they discovered a hyrdocarbon approximately thirty-five times more active —Lawrence Locke, The Lamp, Summer 1971 To summarize, Noah Webster's "what before existed" applies well enough to discover in uses that do not compete at all with invent. In some constructions discover can be used where invent cannot. And in sentences with noun objects where the two words can compete, discover is more likely than invent to suggest an accidental, unexpected, or merely hoped-for result. |
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