| 词组 | foist, fob off |
| 释义 | foist, fob off Fowler 1926 discovered a sentence in a British newspaper beginning, "The general public is much too easily foisted off with the old cry...." This construction, said Fowler, was wrong; fob off could be used in "the public can be fobbed off with something" or in "something can be fobbed off on the public," but foist could only be used in the second construction. Evans 1957 repeats the gist of Fowler's comments about the construction, but illustrates foist with foisted on. Copperud 1970, 1980 omits the original construction problem altogether, although citing Fowler and Evans. He insists on fob off on and foist on and says foist off is wrong. Longman 1984 takes Fowler's position. We have two separate issues mingled here. The original—Fowler's—concerns the construction in which the public or an individual is foisted off with. Except for the single example he produced, we have no evidence of that construction. Fowler correctly identified the normal idiomatic construction. Copperud's notion of which prepositions may be used with foist, however, conflicts with the evidence we have. Foist—in the construction Fowler considered idiomatic—is used with on, upon, into, and off on. On and upon are by far the most common: • ... a sort of military remittance man foisted on the Europeans —Richard C. Longworth, Saturday Rev., 12 June 1976 • The cause of their sorrow was a unique coffin foisted upon them by their chief supplier of funeral goods —Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982 Into is much less common; all of our evidence for it is British. • ... if one may foist a pun into Lycidas —Notes and Queries, 10 June 1950 Foist off on, which may be in origin a syntactic blend of foist on and fob off on, is a construction that seems to be slightly on the increase. Our evidence for it goes back to 1937: • ... accusing him of gross dishonesty in foisting off on the public a palpable fiction in the guise of an authentic travel book —Charles Roberts Anderson, American Literature, March 1937 • It is indeed remarkable what nonsense about words can be foisted off on scholars having international reputations —Mitford M. Mathews, American Speech, October 1954 • ... those who think that Emma foisted off someone else's child on Nelson —Mollie Hardwick, Emma, Lady Hamilton, 1969 • ... to foist off the cost of inflation on somebody else —David Osborne, Harper's, January 1983 We also find foist off without on: • ... authors who try to foist off the ancient Greek philosopher as some sort of modern biologist —Jeremy Bernstein, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 2 Oct. 1983 To recapitulate: the construction with foist off that Fowler criticized in 1926 is uncommon or unidiomatic enough that it does not appear in our files. The objection to foist off that Copperud built from Fowler is without basis, as the combination is completely standard. |
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