| 词组 | audience |
| 释义 | audience It is not uncommon in the usage business for a specific usage to cause a broad general principle to be erected to correct it. When the movies became popular in the early years of the 20th century, the people who sat in front of the silent screen watching the action were designated by the name used for the people who sat in front of a stage watching the action: audience. Amateurs of Latin were appalled: an audience listens; spectators look. After all, audience is derived from the Latin verb for "to hear." Numerous handbooks lent their weight to the opinion: Utter 1916, MacCracken & Sandison 1917, Ball 1923, Powell 1925, Hyde 1926, Krapp 1927, Morrow's Word Finder, 1927, and more. The opinion was still being repeated by Bernstein 1965 (he reversed himself in 1971). But the battle had been lost before it began; audience had over a century earlier been transferred to seeing in reference to books by Ben Franklin. By the time movies came along, it had been fairly common for several decades at least. This counter-etymological application had gone entirely unnoticed, except in dictionaries. Some examples: • The stricken poet of Racanati had no country, for an Italy in his day did not exist; he had no audience, no celebrity —Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888 • Every author writes for money, for money represents an audience —Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau, 1939 • ... for the scholar-writer to lose the sense of addressing a broad audience —Malcolm Cowley, New Republic, 22 Nov. 1954 • ... the quick reader (who is nearly all your audience) —Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959 The sense applied to readers is still in use. It was recognized in Webster's 1909 and the Merriam-Webster editors added a sense especially for the silent movies in the 1922 Addenda section of that book. The transfer of the meaning of audience in reference to books simply reflects a change in our culture. Before the development of printing, a poet's audience would have been primarily listeners, and only secondarily people who could read the poems in manuscript. After printing, they became primarily readers. And since both the hearers and the readers bore the same relationship to the poet, they inherited the same name, cutting the word off from its Latin root. The transfer to the silent-movie audience was a similar process—adaptation of the word to a new technology. In current English audience is applied to those who see and hear concerts, operas, plays, movies, circuses, and radio and television. • ... became known to network radio as well as television audiences as newscaster —Current Biography, February 1966 In the sense of the reading, viewing, or listening public, it is applied to books and records, as well as to those who view works of visual art. It has even been applied to international high fashion: • While the Dior business was directed towards the Establishment customers on both sides of the Atlantic, Saint Laurent appealed to a much more avant-garde audience —Stanley Marcus, Minding the Store, 1974 These uses are all standard. |
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