| 词组 | finalize |
| 释义 | finalize It has been fashionable to scorn finalize for more than four decades now. Its magic year seems to have been 1942: Perrin & Ebbitt 1972 says that Maury Maverick put finalize on his original list of gobbledy-gook in that year, and Partridge 1942 got in the first blows for the British. The British were quicker to follow up their initial attack than the Americans. A. P. Herbert went after it in Punch in 1945, Ivor Brown in A Word in Your Ear in 1945, and Sir Ernest Gowers in Plain Words in 1948. Gowers quoted Herbert, who, apparently facetiously, used finalize to mean "terminate." Except for a 1944 review of Maverick's gobbledygook list in Time, American comment seems to have waited until the 1950s, especially when President Eisenhower used the word in a speech in 1958. After that everybody seems to have got on the bandwagon. There was quite a bit of confusion about the origin of the word at first. Gowers was sure it was an Americanism, and so were a few 1950s reference works. Even as late as 1980, commentators were writing that President Eisenhower had introduced the word, if not actually coined it. And all the while it had been sitting quietly at the foot of page 948 in Webster's Second 1934—in the pearl section that holds the lower-frequency words. It got into Webster's Second from Australia, chiefly. Our earliest evidence for the word is from a business letter sent here from Melbourne in 1922. In 1923 our agent in Melbourne wrote to report losing the sale of a dictionary because finalize was not in it. The word was apparently quite common in Australia and New Zealand in the 1920s, especially in business circles: • Negotiations are in progress between the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company and Mr. H. H. Sterling ... with a view to his taking a position with the company. The matter has not been finalised — Auckland (New Zealand) Weekly News, 12 Nov. 1925 By 1927 the word had reached the U.S., apparently through the medium of the U.S. Navy; it turns up in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in May of that year. The OED Supplement has British examples from 1930. It seems never to have been considered anything but standard in Australia and New Zealand. It is probably the widespread adoption of the word by various bureaucracies around the time of World War II that brought it to unfavorable notice. Evidence in our files and in the OED Supplement shows that finalize is used in all of the major English-speaking areas of the world. (In British English both -ise and -ize spellings are used, with -ise the more common.) It is still a favorite in business and official English, and thus tends to be found in relatively formal contexts. It is occasionally found in breezy or tongue-in-cheek writing: • In this decent if oppressive garb, she receives from Orloff a ring plighting their troth, and amid protracted twittering the couple finalize plans to marry at once —S. J. Perelman, New Yorker, 27 June 1953 • As I'm Prime Minister today, I thought you'd like to know what's going to be in the forty-one Queen's Speeches, now we've got them all gummed together into one. Of course, it's not exactly finalised yet — Alan Coren, Punch, 24 July 1974 • A total of 32 gigs has so far been finalised —New Musical Express, 31 Jan. 1976 • ... she and Harvey hadn't finalized the parameters of their own interface —Cyra McFadden, The Serial, 1977 But more often it is used in contexts like these: • No advertising budget has been finalised —Evening Press (Dublin, Ireland), 5 June 1974 • The scientist points out, though, that more tests must be conducted before these results are finalized —Barbara Ford, National Wildlife, June-July 1982 • Private placement is legal in all but four states and like agency adoption, it is finalized through the court —Lynne McTaggart, Saturday Rev., 10 Nov. 1979 • ... has finalized a deal with a Canadian music distributor to handle these sales —Valerie Thompson, Quill & Quire, August 1976 • Final regulations were proposed last April, and an I.R.S. official testified today that they may be finalized in about 2 1/2 weeks —Frances Cerra, N.Y. Times, 22 Sept. 1976 • ... in 1824 he journeyed to London to finalize his colonial accounts —Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1967 You do not have to use finalize at all, of course, but it is by now well established as standard. You would have little occasion for it in belles-lettres, but in contexts such as those illustrated here, writers seem to find it useful. |
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