| 词组 | academe, academia |
| 释义 | academe, academia Copperud 1970 reports that both Fowler 1926, 1965 and Evans 1957 disapprove of academe as applied to a place of learning, an academy. Fowler maintains that Academe properly means Aca-demus, a hero of Greek mythology: an olive grove in Athens sacred to his memory was near the place where Plato established his philosophical school, and it gave the name, Academy, to Plato's school. Fowler therefore opines that the "grove of Academe," mentioned by Milton, is correct in reference to Plato's Academy, and that the use of the phrase in Shakespeare, Tennyson, and James Russell Lowell (quoted in the OED) to mean "a seat of learning" is wrong. Evans says that Academe properly refers to Plato's academy; he censures its use otherwise as a pomposity, instancing the title of Mary McCarthy's novel Groves of Academe (1952). Reader's Digest 1983 essentially agrees with Evans; they find in Mary McCarthy's "ironic" title the origin of modern journalistic use, of which they disapprove, recommending the use of academia instead. These notions need to be disentangled and examined. First, we have academe used to mean a place of learning. As far as we can tell, this use was invented by Shakespeare, who needed a three-syllable word for academy: • From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.—Love's Labour's Lost, 1595 • What Shakespeare has done here is to establish a literary expression—he used it both literally and figuratively in the same play—that would be echoed by later writers, Tennyson and Lowell among them. Fowler's objection came 330 years too late. A 17th-century writer named Peacham cited in the OED also used the word, suggesting to someone that "thy solitary Academe should be some shady grove upon the Thames' fair side." This is the earliest attachment of grove in English, but it took Milton to firmly unite the two words. In the fourth book of Paradise Regained (1671) Satan is lecturing the Son of God on the literature and culture of the gentiles. He mentions Athens: • See there the olive-grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills... Here Academe means Academus; like Shakespeare before him, Milton changed the usual word for the sake of his meter. No one seems to have followed Milton's spelling of the hero's name, but the phrase grove of Academe has stayed with us, eventually becoming plural by the mid-19th century. So we have Shakespeare's academe, both literal and figurative, and Milton's grove of Academe, referring to Plato's Academy. Our evidence suggests, not surprisingly, that the phrase occurred chiefly in poetry. Being a literary allusion, its reference was not necessarily precise. Sometimes it might pretty clearly indicate the Platonic surrounds: • Fulfilment of his boyhood's dream, Greece welcomes now the freedman's son; • He haunts the groves of Academe, And quaffs the springs of Helicon —John Osborne Sargent, Horatian Echoes, 1893 And other times it might suggest a wider reference: • And whether in the groves of Academe, Or where contending factions strive and strain In the mid-current of life's turbid stream, His honour knew no stain—Charles L. Graves, "Samuel Henry Butcher," 1856 The same characteristics of the phrase also are evident in prose. Sometimes the reference is clearly to Plato: • ... his studious fréquentation of that Hercynian forest, which takes the place of the groves of Academe in German philosophical writing —George Saints-bury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, 1896 And sometimes not: • Out of the groves of Academe comes a voice of lamentation for the political sins of New York. It is that of Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University —N Y. Herald, 24 Jan. 1904 Here the reference is clearly to the academic world or the academic community. This sense can also be found without the groves: • He lived within a stone's throw of Academe, and he threw the stone —American Mercury, November 1928 As the sense relating to the academic world or community grew in use (with and without groves), specific reference to Plato's Academy receded. By the time that Evans 1957 was trying to restrict Academe to Platonic reference, such use had all but disappeared. Loss of specific reference is further demonstrated by the diminishing use of the capital A. Lowell had used Shakespeare's academe with a lowercase a in 1870; the newer sense began to appear lowercase in American publications in the mid-1920s, and by the 1950s lowercase prevailed, although capitalized examples may still be found from time to time. We do not know exactly what Mary McCarthy had in mind when she chose Groves of Academe as a title, but we do know the phrase was well established by 1952, even in its widest reference (the Graves poem cited above is dated 1856). Her novel may well have added to the popularity of both the phrase and the word academe. Here are some examples of how academe is actually used. Shakespeare's original figurative sense is still alive, although the contexts are not so elevated: • Out of the groves of a ragtime academe ... came Fats Waller's stride-style piano —Barry Ulanov, A Handbook of Jazz, 1957 • ... splendid new texts from two doyennes of Manhattan's Chinese cooking academe —Ellen Stern, New York, 9 June 1975 It is also used to mean an academic: • Young academes who have not read the works listed say my choice is capricious —Ezra Pound, Polite Essays, 1937 But by far the most common use is to indicate the academic environment, community, or world: • Here is the essence of academe: the trials and tribulations of midnight oil —The Bookman, March 1925 • ... it is clear that he speaks of the publishing scene from the remoteness of the groves of academe — Charles J. Rolo, Atlantic, July 1956 • ... out of the sweat of the schoolroom where it belongs into the Groves of Academe —Times Literary Supp., 14 Nov. 1968 • ... because the most influential men in business, labor and academe appeared ready to help him — Max Frankel, N.Y. Times, 8 Jan. 1968 • He deliberately lived outside Detroit and away from the other auto people, in the Ann Arbor groves of academe —David Halberstam, Harper's, February 1971 • It is some years since I've been in an American university, but I can't believe that activist corruption there has hit the very decor of academe as it has in Italy —Anthony Burgess, Saturday Rev., 13 May 1978 • ... pleasant cafes are being opened by enthusiastic refugees from the theater, the arts, academe, and the professions —John L. Hess & Karen Hess, The Taste of America, 1977 • ... deep in the thickets of academe where feminism trysts with sociology —Anne Crutcher, Wall Street Jour., 3 Feb. 1982 • The writer in the tower of Academe looks out upon the world like a god —Earl Shorris, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 1 July 1984 Academia is a more recent word. It has been filtered through Latin from the Greek. Its earliest appearance in our files is as a synonym for Plato's Academy: • From the Acropolis to the gardens of the Academia —C. M. Thompson, translation of Georges Clemenceau, Demosthenes, 1926 This use appears not to have caught on. In 1946 it turned up as a synonym for the most popular sense of academe: • ... beyond the complacent paddocks of academia, clubdom, or social status —Lucien Price, Atlantic, June 1946 It has stuck: • ... the self-directed scholar who investigates items about which he is from time to time curious, without concern for the shaping of policy, the government of tribes, or the fashions of academia —David Ries-man, New Republic, 12 Jan. 1953 • He was intent on carving a career of public service, not within the halls of academia but on the national and international stage —Times Literary Supp., 16 Jan. 1964 • ... where the mandarins of academia dine with top Pentagon officials and Senators —Robert Reinhold, N.Y. Times, 18 Aug. 1974 • Like the homosexual professors who are rising fast in American academia —Pauline Kael, in The Film, 1968 • ... students ... itchy to close their notebooks and break out of the halls of academia —Susan McDonald, Hampshire Life, 1 Feb. 1986 • ... the Potential Gas Committee, whose members represent all branches of the industry, as well as the government and academia —David Osborne, Atlantic, March 1984 • The modern traffic from academia to public life can show nothing to its medieval counterpart —Gordon Leff, Times Literary Supp., 20 Nov. 1981 Conclusion: The use of Academe to refer to Plato's Academy seems to be moribund: we have no evidence of its use since the 1920s. Academe for Academus was used only by Milton, and survives only in the fixed phrase groves of Academe, where its origin is in general forgotten, as the prevalent lowercasing of the phrase attests. People who insist that these are the only correct uses are living in the past. Both academe and academia are in current good usage in American and British English meaning "academic life, environment, community, world." When these words begin to steal each other's metaphors and insinuate themselves into other hoary metaphors of academic life—when we find groves of academia, halls not of ivy but academia, towers not of ivory but of Academe, and thickets rather than groves of academe—it is clear that they have firmly established themselves in the language. They appear to be used with about equal frequency at the present. |
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