| 词组 | abortive |
| 释义 | abortive A love of etymology and the consequent dismembering of English words into their presumed constituent parts has led many a usage commentator down the primrose path of error (see etymological fallacy). Safire 1982 seconds a correspondent's objection to the use of abortive to describe a failed mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in 1979. Safire claims to see in the suffix -ive an implication of continuation or permanence, and he maintains that abortive must therefore "suggest a continuous process of aborting." This is, of course, a conclusion that could only be reached by ignoring the use of the whole word in English in favor of speculating about what it might mean. No "continuous process of aborting" is suggested by Shakespeare's line • Why should I joy in any abortive birth? —Love's Labour's Lost, 1595 Safire further asserts that "'abortive efforts' should be used only when the emphasis is on a series of past failures." In actuality the word is often used to modify a plural noun, but emphasis on past failures may or may not be present: • ... a magazine existed,—after so many abortive attempts —Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, rev. ed., 1946 • ... and forget that abortive efforts from want of heart are as possible to revenge as to generosity — Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886 • He knew it was like feeling over a chilling motor for loose wires, and after two or three abortive motions he gave it up —Wallace Stegner, "The Traveler," in Perspectives USA, Summer 1953 Moreover, many a writer from Shakespeare to the present has used the word of a single incident with no hint of recurrence or permanence: • The power that had proved too strong for this abortive restoration —Arnold J. Toynbee, Center Mag., March 1968 • After the abortive Decembrist insurrection in 1825 —George F. Kennan, New Yorker, 1 May 1971 • In describing her abortive visit —Margery Sharp, Britannia Mews, 1946 • In September, 1938, came the Munich crisis.... The result was only an abortive armistice —Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaign address, 28 Oct. 1940, in Nothing to Fear, ed. B. D. Zevin, 1946 • There was an abortive conspiracy against the life of the Princeps —John Buchan, Augustus, 1937 • Only at the third did our visit prove abortive —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1904 • ... Mr. Pickwick expressed a strong desire to recollect a song which he had heard in his infancy, and the attempt proving abortive, sought to stimulate his memory with more glasses of punch —Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 1836-37 • Two slips of ground, half arable, half overrun with an abortive attempt at shrubbery —Sir Walter Scott, The Surgeon's Daughter, 1827 (OED) • Our first design, my friend, has prov'd abortive — Joseph Addison, Cato, 1713 (OED) |
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