| 词组 | elegant |
| 释义 | elegant British travelers in America during the 19th century frequently commented unfavorably on the American use of elegant as a synonym of fine or excellent, as in "it's an elegant morning." H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, Supplement I (1945), notes that various commentators have recorded the use of elegant with such nouns as potatoes, mill, lighthouse, hogs, bacon, corn, and whiskey, to name a few. Such usage seems to have been confined almost entirely to speech. Here's an example of it from the dialogue of a novel set in Virginia around 1870: • "I'll take her right to the hospital and give her to the doctor in charge She has an elegant chance of pulling through, there " —Joseph Hergesheimer, Mountain Blood, 1915 Chances are you've never seen or heard elegant used in this way. We don't know for certain how widespread such usage was in the past, but we feel safe in saying that it is now extremely rare, if it continues to occur at all. A somewhat similar use of elegant is in such sentences as "we had an elegant time" and "we were served an elegant meal": • ... until dinnertime, when an elegant roast was served —Andrew W. Turnbull, New Yorker, 7 Apr. 1956 Criticism of such usage was common in the early 20th century, and it can still be heard on occasion. The critics regard elegant in such sentences as nothing more than a generalized term of approval equivalent to pleasing or agreeable, but that view strikes us as an oversimplification. To describe a time or a meal as elegant is to imply not simply that it was pleasing, but that it was pleasing to persons of refinement and cultivation. Such implications may seem pretentious or affected in many cases, but they are not inconsistent with the normal connotations of elegant. In any case, the criticized uses of elegant are less common than they once were, and the strong objections they once invited seem to have been largely forgotten. |
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