| 词组 | acid test |
| 释义 | acid test Back in 1920 when H. W. Fowler was compiling his magnum opus (Fowler 1926), he rioted that acid test had the greatest vogue of all the popularized technicalities he was listing. He attributed the popularity of the phrase to Woodrow Wilson's conspicuous use of it during World War I. The OED Supplement cites Wilson: • The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will —The Times, 9 Jan. 1918 The same statement was paraphrased just a couple of weeks later: • He said the attitude of other nations toward revolutionary Russia was the acid test of their democracy and good faith —Saturday Evening Post, 25 Jan. 1918 The OED Supplement shows that the figurative sense of acid test—"a crucial test"—had actually been in use as early as 1912, but Fowler was probably right in attributing its sudden popularity to Wilson. The Saturday Evening Post report is the earliest citation in the Mer-riam-Webster files. It was soon followed by more evidence from 1918, 1919, and the early 1920s, and the term was entered in the 1923 Addenda section of Webster 1909. As is often the case with a phrase that has become popular in a relatively short time, acid test was soon disparaged as a cliché—as early as 1929 by one John Y. T. Greig in Breaking Priscian's Head; or, English as She Will Be Spoke and Wrote. A number of subsequent commentators—some as recent as Shaw 1975 and Bremner 1980—have repeated that judgment. Howard 1983 gives a somewhat different opinion, calling the term "old-fashioned," which it may be in British English. Our files do not have enough evidence to confirm or refute his opinion; we do have evidence, however, that acid test is still flourishing on this side of the Atlantic. The expression is a metaphor derived from the practice of testing gold with acid. The use of acid test in print for the chemical operation is rare; and even though we have evidence of other technical uses of acid test, the figurative use is by far the dominant one in 20th-century English. The question of what constitutes a cliché is not simple (see the discussion at cliché), so we will leave you to judge acid test from these examples, drawn from eight decades of use. We do note that the phrase seems not to be much used in literary contexts. • Every banking institution in this country to-day applies an acid test to applications for loans. Is the note which it will receive capable of discount with the Federal Reserve Bank? —The Nation, 28 Mar. 1918 • ... the scientist is content to hold them up to the acid test of present-day efficiency — World's Work, November 1928 • The peculiar drudgery ... of reading papers is the acid test of the teacher —English Jour., December 1935 • ... should say something about selling textbooks, for in the American economic system that is the acid test of any product —Textbooks in Education, 1949 • ... rationally testing our hypothesis by the acid test of seeing how it works in experience —Gardner Murphy, in Feelings and Emotions, ed. Martin L. Reymert, 1950 • The acid test will be whether the members of the United Nations, in it and through it, will be able to stop an aggressor —Sir Leslie Munro, United Nations: Hope for a Divided World, 1960 • ... he has avoided the acid test of declaring himself in detail on Vietnam —Thomas P. Murphy, Trans-Action, March 1968 • Even when all these acid tests are ruthlessly applied, however, the inventory of probable Scandinavian phonic and lexical influences in English remains impressive—JohnGeipel, The Viking Legacy, 1971 • Deciding to put Patria Mia to the acid test without beating about the bush, I ordered calamari luciana as my entrée the first time I set foot in the place — Jay Jacobs, Gourmet, February 1979 • ... Sawyer has devised an acid test for friendship: take a job that requires getting up at 5:30 in the afternoon —Margo Howard, People, 5 Nov. 1984 |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。