| 词组 | errant, arrant |
| 释义 | errant, arrant 1. Errant and arrant were once synonymous words, but they long ago came to be distinguished from each other in their principal senses. The fundamental meaning of errant is "wandering" (as in "an errant knight"), while arrant, which also once meant "wandering," now has the sense "utterly bad" (as in "arrant nonsense"). The OED shows that arrant originated as a variant of errant, and that its current sense developed from its use in such phrases as "an arrant thief," which originally meant a wandering, vagrant thief but came eventually to be understood as an utterly bad thief. "Utterly bad" has been the principal sense of arrant since at least Shakespeare's time: • We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us — Shakespeare, Ha mlet, 1601 Errant has also been used in this sense: • They are errant cowards —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719 (OED) But this sense of errant seems never to have been very common and is now usually considered obsolete. As a topic for discussion by usage commentators, the distinction between errant and arrant has a long but otherwise unimpressive history. The first to broach the subject was Robert Baker 1770, who complained that the words were frequently confused, and that errant in particular was often mistakenly used in place of arrant, even by good writers (such as Daniel Defoe). No other critic took up the matter for almost 200 years—until 1957, to be precise, when Bergen and Cornelia Evans suggested that it might be a good idea to avoid both words, on the grounds that errant had become "archaic and literary" and that arrant was rarely used except in clichés. Copperud 1964 simply warned against confusing one word for the other. What our evidence shows is that both words continue in fairly common use. The distinction in meaning prescribed by Baker and Copperud definitely is generally observed in modern usage, but errant still turns up on rare occasions in place of arrant: • ... it is errant stupidity to look for simplicity in so-called simple cultures —Farley Mowat, People of the Deer, 1952 • ... find it insulting, if not errant nonsense —David L. Shores, in Papers in Language Variation, ed. David L. Shores & Carole P. Hines, 1977 Such usage can be defended on historical grounds, but you would probably do better to choose arrant when you mean "utterly bad." 2. In accordance with the difference in spelling between errant and arrant, there has arisen a distinction in pronunciation, Ver-antX versus \\\\'ar-ənt\\\\; but for a great many speakers who do not distinguish \\\\e\\\\ and \\\\a\\\\ before \\\\r\\\\ the distinction is impossible to maintain. Both pronunciations must therefore be considered acceptable for either word. For a related but distinct question of pronunciation, see err. |
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