| 词组 | flair |
| 释义 | flair 1. Flair is a fairly recent import from French, first attested in English in its current manifestation in 1881. Our evidence from the early 20th century regularly puts the word in quotation marks or italics: writers (or editors) seemed to feel the word was foreign. Fowler 1926 with his nose for etymology insisted that the primary meaning of the word must be "keen scent, capacity for getting on the scent of something desired, a good nose for something"—the word means "sense of smell" in French. Obviously it was not so used in English— Fowler picks for censure a completely normal-looking example in which a woman is described as having a flair for cooking and a flair for writing. But once Fowler had started a hare, there were others willing to follow: • Indeed, I am thinking of doing a broadcast about it, calling upon the people to rise and kill off all those who use flair under the impression that it means knack or talent or aptitude —Alexander Woollcott, letter, 23 Jan. 1937 But this was how the word was (and is) being used: • ... the same insight into average men and women, the same flair for differences of character —Harper's, September 1915 • ... Barnum's amazing flair for publicity —The Nation, 11 Apr. 1923 • ... men with less fire but more flair for constructive effort —American Mercury, May 1926 • ... a graduate of Jones Commercial High School with a flair for the mot juste —S. I. Hayakawa, Chicago Sun Book Week, 8 Sept. 1946 • ... an unexpected flair for light comedy —Current Biography, February 1968 • ... a flair for getting the most out of each tidbit — Nicholas Lemann, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 26 June 1983 Flair is also used to mean "inclination, tendency, penchant": • The Greeks, who had a flair for renaming everything they came in contact with —Lowell Thomas, Beyond the Khyber Pass, 1925 • ... their flair for dramatic public announcements — Leslie H. Gelb & Morton H. Halperin, Harper's, November 1971 And there's a sense for an attractive quality—"style, verve, panache": • ... no politician ... who has rushed into print can compare with Mr. Churchill in historical flair, literary skill —Political Science Quarterly, December 1923 • When carried off with real flair, the general flow of the music makes one willing to overlook any momentary reminiscences —Aaron Copland, Our New Music, 1941 • ... and his neckties, well, they had flair —Robert Henderson, New Yorker, 22 Apr. 1967 • Not only did the Reds lose, but they lost with flair —Herrn Weiskopf, Sports Illustrated, 19 July 1982 These uses have been standard all along. The issue appears to be dead now. 2. Flair, flare. A number of handbooks warn against confusing these homophones. Part of the trouble is that flair is an occasional variant of flare in the sense of "a spreading outward." When pants with flared legs were fashionable, they were sometimes spelled flairs and sometimes flares. Aside from this, we have little recent evidence for flair in this sense. In other senses we find occasional uncertainty about spelling. In the first of these examples flare would be more usual; in the second it should be flair: • A bloop hit is a flair —Phil Pepe, in Baseball Digest, November 1974 • ... Gift Selections with an Early American Rare — advt., Early American Life, December 1979 |
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