| 词组 | envisage, envision |
| 释义 | envisage, envision Envisage got started in English in the early 19th century with the sense, now archaic, of "to meet squarely," "confront," "face." • Must I recognize the bitter truth? ... I have envisaged it —George Meredith, The Egoist, 1879 (OED) By 1837 a second sense was developing which the OED defines as "To obtain a mental view of, set before the mind's eye; to contemplate; chiefly, to view or regard under a particular aspect." Webster's Third divides this sense into two subsenses, using a total of five rephras-ings and two synonyms to thoroughly cover the different shades of meaning. In 1926 Fowler took exception to envisage, calling it "a 19th-century word only, & a surely undesirable GALLICISM. Face, confront, contemplate, recognize, realize, view & regard seem equal between them to all requirements." How can a word that is so obviously useful, carrying such a wide range of meaning, be "surely undesirable"? We do not understand Fowler's judgment, but Nicholson 1957 and Gowers in Fowler 1965 agreed with it enough to put versions of his article in their respective revisions of his book. Nicholson and Gowers perceive two uses for envisage. The first is the one for which we are advised to use a word from the multisynonym list (to which Gowers adds imagine, intend, and visualize); they follow Fowler's lead in berating this sense. The second is what Nicholson defines as "the current meaning, 'obtain a mental view,' 'set before the mind's eye"' and what Gowers defines as "forming a mental picture of something that may exist in the future"; this sense they perceive as allowable. Now, according to the definitions in Webster's Third and the OED, the second sense approved by Nicholson and Gowers is actually the same sense as the one which belongs to most of the verbs in those lists of synonyms. They do not like the sense when it is defined by synonym, but they are willing to give it limited approval when they have redefined it themselves. This is what comes of trying to adjust reality and received opinion to each other instead of taking a fresh view of reality. Since the distinction that Nicholson and Gowers make is an artificial one, it comes as no surprise that people actually using envisage do not make it. Envisage can express a broad range of nuances and is a very useful word—so useful that it has a look-alike twin, envision. Envision appeared on the scene by 1919—late enough, apparently, to escape Fowler's censorious eye and, as a result, to be ignored by Nicholson and Gowers. Evans 1957 accepts both words but claims that envision is the more poetic of the two and "is properly confined to those ecstatic or alarming foreshadowings that visions are made on." Bryson 1984 has a milder version of the same opinion: "Envision is slightly the loftier of the two." In actual practice this distinction does not hold true, as the examples below will show you. Bryson also says, "If there is no mental image involved, neither word is correct. A rough rule is that if you find yourself following either word with 'that' you are using it incorrectly." We disagree. Envisage and envision are almost never followed by that, yet in spite of this fact they can both be used in sentences that conjure up no mental picture. Sometimes the thing envisaged or envisioned is a concept more abstract than a mental image. When a specific picture is in mind, however, writers tend to use envision more than envisage. None of the critics mention this. Here are some citations which show how envisage and envision are used and how the distinctions that usage writers have made are not always reflected in actual usage. • ... I could envisage without difficulty a typical ... day —P. G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning, 1946 • ... because she thought of the path as running, she envisaged all else as standing still —Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 1949 • ... a social salvation ... which he envisages as the possible and necessary experience of millions of individuals —Lionel Trilling, New Yorker, 24 Nov. 1951 • ... all Utopias ... envisage a different kind of men and women from any that we know —Times Literary Supp., 23 Apr. 1971 • ... we envisage booming demand for political scientists —Alan Abelson, Barron's, 8 May 1972 • ... he envisages sex as a sort of universal spiritual energy —Iris Murdoch, The Fire and The Sun, 1977 • ... by envisioning the religious pattern within our lives —Stephen Spender, New Republic, 3 Aug. 1953 • The dingy office, pathetic with an out-moded elegance of brass rail and threadbare carpet, was exactly what Mr. Campion had envisioned —Margery Allingham, More Work for the Undertaker, 1949 • We envision this new sytem being in production in about two years —J. S. Anderson, quoted in General Electric Investor, Summer 1971 • ... he had come to envision himself as a symptomatic consciousness —John W. Aldridge, Saturday Rev., 13 Nov. 1971 • ... had envisioned only the possibility of humiliation —Stanley Marcus, Minding the Store, 1974 • ... we may envision the appalled face of Emerson — Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry, 1975 These examples show that, in many respects, envisage and envision are interchangeable. Reader's Digest 1983 concedes as much and so does Shaw 1975, though he spoils the effect by saying that "both words are so ponderous that neither should be used in ordinary circumstances." Once again, we beg to differ. Envisage and envision may not pop up in the day-to-day conversation of most people or in very informal kinds of writing, but they have established a firm place for themselves in all other varieties of standard English. |
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