| 词组 | drink |
| 释义 | drink The usual 20th-century past tense of this verb is drank and the past participle, drunk. Usage is not entirely uniform yet, although it is closer to uniform than it has been in the past. The OED notes that the past tense drunk was in good use from the 16th through the 19th centuries; Johnson's 1755 Dictionary gives it as a standard variant. Its status has receded since, and it now seems to be relegated to dialect and to what H. L. Mencken called the vulgate: • "He said he drunk very little," she reminded me — Ring Lardner, The Big Town, 1921 The past participle drank is a more complex problem. The OED says that it came in during the 17th century. It seems to have been used commonly from the 17th century at least until Jane Austen's time: • NURSE. That, miss, is for fear you should be drank before you are ripe —Sir John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, 1696 • ... having read somewhere that cold water drank plentifully was good for a fever —Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1771 • Monboddo dined with me lately, and having drank tea, we were a good while by ourselves —James Boswell, letter, 14 Feb. 1777 • It is evening; we have drank tea —Jane Austen, letter, 2 Mar. 1814 Johnson's Dictionary did not give drank as a past participle—only drunk and drunken—but to illustrate one sense of drink Johnson quotes Dr. Arbuthnot using had drank, and the OED shows that Johnson himself used the form. Hall 1917 cites authors as recent as Robert Louis Stevenson for the form and further informs us that it had in his own time considerable vogue in polite spoken English. On the other hand, Cobbett 1823 disapproved drank as a past participle. So did Richard Grant White 1870. White's remarks were objections to the use of irregular verbs by Sterne, Pope, and Swift; he was caught out for this by Fitzedward Hall in Recent Exemplifications of False Philology (1872). Hall must have made a convincing case for drank, for Bardeen 1883 put it among the words he styled legitimate, though carped at by some critics. Still, most early 20th-century comment ran against the form. Handbooks such as Utter 1916, Krapp 1927, and Lurie 1927 did not approve it; the editors of Webster's Second (1934) moved it from the main entry of drink, where it had been in Webster 1909, and stuck it in the pearl section at the bottom of the page, labeled erroneous. Linguistic geographers around the middle of the century discovered, however, that the handbooks and Webster's Second were treating drank with less respect than it deserved. It was still in polite spoken use in some parts of the U.S. and Canada, and indeed was the majority use in a few areas. It is primarily a spoken form, but it does pop up from time to time in prose written by someone whose dialect still contains the form: • Two inmates at the Berkshire County House of Correction were taken to Hillcrest Hospital Tuesday evening after they had reportedly drank Lysol — Springfield (Mass.) Morning Union, 21 Nov. 1984 In writing, you will want to use the past drank and the past participle drunk. The past drunk is essentially dialectal. The past participle drank is still in standard spoken use in some parts of the U.S. and Canada, but it is seldom used in print. See also drunk, drunken. |
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