| 词组 | execute |
| 释义 | execute 1. As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his Imaginary Conversations, objected to using execute to mean "to put to death." However, the most widely read and strident manifesto on this subject was that of Richard Grant White 1870, who scathingly referred to the "vicious use of this word" which "produces sheer nonsense" because, he claimed, it is only a law or a sentence that gets executed, not a person. White called for "a vigorous and persistent effort on the part of the best speakers and writers and professional teachers" to fight this use even though—as he himself said—execute had meant "to put to death" for quite a long time to quite a number of people. He was apparently spurred on rather than deterred by the fact that his convictions ran totally counter to actual usage. The response to his remarks must have been a disappointment to him. Ayres 1881 did reprise White's argument, ascribing it to "some of our careful speakers," but only after noting that "the dictionaries and almost universal usage say that [execute] also means to put to death in conformity with a judicial sentence." Ayres refrained from stating an opinion of his own about execute; he only reported the opinions of others. This was as close as White got to support for his views among contemporary usage writers. Fitzedward Hall in Recent Exemplifications of False Philology ( 1872) argued that the sense was valid because otherwise "Executioner, which we use only in one sense, would pass clear out of our language, under Mr. White's purification of it." Since White's time other writers have referred to his opinion, but most have made it clear that the weight of usage is overwhelmingly against it. The sense of execute meaning "to put to death" has been around since at least 1483, was used by Shakespeare, Gibbon, and Macaulay, and is firmly established in standard English. • ... four days after their trial, Rochford and the four other condemned men were executed —Edith Sitwell, Fanfare for Elizabeth, 1946 2. Recent usage books have included only a smattering of comment about execute. Flesch 1964 and Janis 1984 disapprove of using it to mean "sign" when referring to a document. We lack evidence for this use in general contexts and suspect it may be common only in the legal and business worlds. Harper 1985 says that execute is not a synonym for kill or murder and that it means "to kill [a person] in compliance with a military order or judicial decision." Terrorists and others who seek to justify their actions are probably the most likely to use execute to mean "kill." Such semantic tinkering is objectionable on moral rather than linguistic grounds. |
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