| 词组 | figurehead |
| 释义 | figurehead Copperud 1970, 1980 says that figurehead is "often misapplied to people" which is a statement not easy to understand in itself, since the word's chief use when not designating a figure on a ship's bow is its application to people. What Copperud offers by way of clarification is a couple of examples in which the term is not applied in its usual pejorative sense of "a head or chief in name only." But the application of figurehead to people is a metaphorical extension; Copperud seems to have found two uses in which the writers had a different notion of the metaphor from the accepted one. We have a similar example: • The child who does not honor his father and mother will seldom honor teacher, business senior or the figureheads of state and government —H. H. Arnold & Ira C. Eaker, Army Flyer, 5th ed., 1942 And here is another one, somewhat different, but still not pejorative: • For surely Amory Blaine ... is an odd figurehead for the Jazz Age —Maxwell Geismar, The Last of the Provincials, 1947 We frankly cannot say that these are mistakes. They are metaphorical extensions of the original sense, but it is not easy to define them. What we may have in them is a different sense that is of such infrequent occurrence in print that dictionary editors have had no need to try to figure out its meaning yet. It may even be passé already; the dates on the examples are not especially recent. It is possible that such a use could cause confusion on the part of the reader, to whom the pejorative sense may be the most familiar. But our evidence shows that pejorative use tends to be signaled by the context: only, mere, merely are often used, or the context otherwise makes the meaning plain. Even the familiar use, "a head or chief in name only," can be without much in the way of pejorative overtones: • The Crown Prince moved in a circle of silly young officers, who talked in bellicose and boastful terms; and he was sometimes tempted to put himself forward as figurehead for the most aggressive German militarists—Times Literary Supp., 3 Sept. 1954 |
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