| 词组 | evacuate |
| 释义 | evacuate The use of evacuate to mean "to remove (people) especially from a military zone or dangerous area" was once controversial. It is not new by any means (its roots go back to the 17th century), but its widespread occurrence is a fairly recent development, dating back only to the first World War: • ... the English system of evacuating the wounded — Yale Rev., April 1916 Early critics of evacuate in this sense believed that only the place from which the people were removed could properly serve as the object of the verb: "the city was evacuated" but not "the people were evacuated from the city." The argument was based on etymology—evacuate is derived from the Latin evacuare, "to make empty." To speak of evacuating people, in the view of the critics, was to speak of making them empty, which was a pretty peculiar thing to speak of. This issue was taken up by a few commentators up to and through the period of World War II, but the "remove" sense of evacuate had by then proved to be so useful and popular that any criticism of it had the hollow ring of pure pedantry, and the controversy quickly died out. The respectability of this sense is no longer subject to question: • ... sent planes to evacuate the British residents of Kashmir —Robert Sherrod, Saturday Evening Post, 19 June 1954 • ... the Rostropovich family was evacuated to the city of Orenburg —Current Biography, May 1966 • ... was also counted on to evacuate ARVN troops if a retreat proved necessary —I. F. Stones Bi- Weekly, 8 Mar. 1971 |
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