| 词组 | encounter |
| 释义 | encounter Kilpatrick 1984 notes that he was once criticized by a correspondent for using encounter to mean "meet with" or "come across," as in "books I have encountered." He agrees with his critic that such usage is incorrect and that encounter properly means "to meet as an adversary or enemy; to engage in conflict with; to run into a complication." Certainly encounter has those meanings, but we wonder why Kilpatrick is so ready to abandon its "meet with" sense, which the OED shows to have been in use since the 14th century. J. Leslie Hall investigated the pedigree of this sense in 1917 and found that it had been used by such writers as Samuel Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Hall considered it a somewhat "old-fashioned" sense, but our evidence shows that its occurrence in current English is common and perfectly idiomatic: • ... they experienced under simulated conditions the sensations they would encounter in space —Current Biography, November 1965 • ... she stole on tiptoe downstairs ... praying devoutly that she would encounter no one —Katherine Anne Porter, Ladies' Home Jour., August 1971 • ... will be happy to encounter once again the author's balanced prose —William V. Shannon, Saturday Rev., 7 Aug. 1976 |
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