| 词组 | flounder, founder |
| 释义 | flounder, founder A person flounders by struggling to move or obtain footing, while a ship founders by filling with water and sinking. Usage writers say that these two words are often confused, and we have found that flounder and founder, whether used literally or figuratively, sometimes do borrow each other's meaning. • ... Cabeza de Vaca's boat had floundered in 1528 — Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire, 1952 • ... our political parties must never flounder on the rocks of moral equivocation —Adlai E. Stevenson, Speeches, ed. Richard Harrity, 1952 • Their discourse floundered.... They sat staring numbly at each other —Margaret Cousins, Ladies' Home Jour., October 1971 • ... bloodhounds ... raced confidently through the campus right to the highway ... and there they foundered —Edward Corsetti, True Police Cases, October 1959 Flounder for founder is a substitution much likelier to be encountered than the reverse. And the uses of founder for flounder tend to read as though some third verb might be what the writer really wanted. Crossover uses of flounder are more straightforwardly cases of confusion with founder. We do not have enough evidence to say that a new sense has become established in either case. Critics such as Bernstein 1958 and Freeman 1983 also disapprove of founder paired with sink as redundant: • The ship carrying Manoel's rhinoceros foundered off the coast of Genoa and sank with all hands —Calvin Tomkins, New Yorker, 20 Nov. 1971 The redundancy is undeniable, but the offense seems minor. Founder and sink is not much different from other redundant pairs long sanctioned by idiom: dead and gone, fear and trembling, huff and puff. Occasionally a sentence will allow either flounder or founder to be used. • ... the thick yellow hawser visible beyond my porthole was ... what a life preserver was to the floundering man —John Hawkes, "The Ship," in Fiction, vol. 1, no. 4, 1973 Except for such contexts, however, it is probably better to keep the meanings of these two words distinct. |
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