| 词组 | echelon |
| 释义 | echelon Echelon is originally a French word meaning literally "a rung on a ladder." It was borrowed into English in the late 18th century in a figurative sense denoting a step-like military formation, and it remained primarily a military word for about 150 years thereafter, developing several additional senses during that time. One military sense it had developed by the end of World War II was "a level in a chain of command": • It is a principle that a higher echelon maintain communications to the next lower echelon —Coast Artillery Jour., November-December 1944 In this sense, echelon began to appear commonly in general publications: • Both were highly placed staff officers at top-echelon headquarters —Edward Weeks, Atlantic, June 1946 And it quickly came to be applied to civilian as well as military organizations: • ... twelve men who formed the party's top echelon —Newsweek, 2 Aug. 1948 • Primary attention is given to the highest echelons of the public service —John W. Gardner, Yale Rev., Summer 1949 This is now the most common use of echelon. Several commentators have objected to the popular extended sense of echelon, essentially because they regard it as overused. Sir Ernest Gowers (in Fowler 1965) describes it as a "slipshod extension" of the "steplike formation" sense, but it should be noted that the new sense is perfectly consistent with the original meaning, "a rung on a ladder." In any case, as Copperud 1980 notes, the new sense "is now so popular that uprooting it would be a fearsome task." It would, in fact, be impossible. |
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