| 词组 | end up |
| 释义 | end up 1. End up is an "unacceptable colloquialism for end or conclude" proclaims Macmillan 1982. (According to the introduction to their guide to usage, a colloquialism is ipso facto unacceptable in formal writing.) Setting aside for now the matter of whether end up is a colloquialism, let's take a look at the difference between end and end up. The first point to notice is that end up is not substituted for all senses of the verb end but almost always is used to mean "to reach a specified ultimate rank or situation." • ... the dinner-glasses disappeared one by one the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a tooth-brush holder —F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Cut-Glass Bowl," 1920, in The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945 • "... He might even end up by wanting me to pull drill with the Company" —James Jones, From Here to Eternity, 1951 • ... the party ended up with a minority in Congress —Gus Tyler, New Republic, 21 June 1954 • Hollywood parties, those celebrated institutions which so frequently... end up in romance or in tragedy —Peter Ustinov, London Calling, 5 Aug. 1954 • ... we still end up with a total of 25,137 possible morpheme shapes —William G. Moulton, NEA Jour., January 1965 • They ended up fighting it out among themselves — Tom Wolfe, New York, 27 Sept. 1971 • ... he ended up at a ferry pier and had to dive into the water to escape —Fox Butterfield, IV. Y. Times, 16 June 1979 Although end also gets used in contexts like these, such use is far outnumbered both by the use of end up and by the use of end in other senses. We suspect, moreover, that end used with this meaning often reveals the hand of a copy editor who followed the advice of a handbook like Macmillan. End alone does not sound as natural as end up in many contexts: • ... an able engineer who ended as a general —Waldemar Kaempffert, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 13 June 1954 • ... he was warned his body would end in a ditch if he did not stop complaining —A. H. Raskin, N. Y. Times Mag., 7 Nov. 1976 Because end up so commonly expresses the meaning "to wind up," its use emphasizes the notion of everything that led up to a certain result, while end emphasizes the notion of finality and more or less ignores what came before. As a result, end can be not only an awkward synonym for end up, but sometimes no synonym at all. This is especially true when end up is followed by a subject complement. End cannot be substituted in the following sentences without changing or losing the meaning. • ... he's probably going straight ahead from here and will end up Governor of Mississippi —Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart, 1954 • ... like everyone else I don't want to end up a festering heap —John Lennon, quoted in Current Biography, December 1965 • ... the October "election" in South Vietnam will end up an utterly meaningless exercise —Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, 18 Sept. 1971 In the course of this discussion you have seen a sampling of the kinds of contexts in which end up normally appears. It should be obvious that "colloquialism" is not an appropriate label for end up. What's more, there is really no difference between the formality of the contexts that end up appears in and those that end appears in. The only difference between the two verbs is one of meaning. 2. When end up is followed by a preposition, the preposition is usually (in rough order of frequency) with, in, as, by, or at. Examples are cited in section 1 above. |
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