| 词组 | drown |
| 释义 | drown 1. Drowned, drownded. Sometime between the age of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare, several English verbs ending with a nasal vowel acquired an unetymo-logical -d at the end. The added -d became permanent in some of these: astound, lend, sound. In others it did not: • ... wou'd be ready To swound at the sight of a new face —Thomas Shadwell, The Sullen Lovers, 1668 Where Shadwell has swound, we would now write swoon. Drown was one of the verbs that acquired an intrusive d. The variant drownd, says the OED, flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 18th century it seems to have been felt to be dialectal: Swift puts it into the mouth of Tom Neverout in Polite Conversation ( 1738): • ... don't throw Water on a drownded Rat. But other characters in this piece say drown'd; for instance, Colonel Atwit: • ... he that is born to be hang'd, will never be drown'd. Drownd was apparently first attacked by John With-erspoon in The Druid, 16 May 1781, who called it "a vulgarism in England and America" (cited in Mencken 1963, abridged). It has been used in rural humor: • And sing like a medder-lark all day long, And drownd her cares in the joys o' song—James Whitcomb Riley, Farm-Rhymes, 1883 • "Mebby I shall be drounded on dry land, Josiah Allen, but I don't believe it." —Marietta Holley, "A Pleasure Exertion," in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, 1888 It is still put into the mouths of fictional characters of rural background or of little education. It is no longer part of standard written or spoken English. 2.Drowned, was drowned. It is a convention of newspaper writers and editors that drowned should be used for an accidental drowning, and was drowned for an intentional drowning. Thus, "she drowned in the lake" should imply an accident, and "she was drowned in the lake" should bring An American Tragedy to mind. The convention may be usefully observed in journalistic reports of drownings, but it is not much observed in other kinds of writing, especially when there is no implication of foul play: • ... Cessair, a fictitious granddaughter of Noah, comes to Ireland forty days early to escape the Flood ... only to be drowned ... with her brother and fifty maidens —George Brandon Saul, The Shadow of the Three Queens, 1953 In some figurative uses the matter of intention may be moot: • ... a Caesar salad that is fine when not drowned in dressing —Mimi Sheraton, N. Y. Times, 18 Jan. 1980 Unless you are reporting an actual drowning, you probably need not worry about using the passive. |
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