| 词组 | acquaint |
| 释义 | acquaint 1. Two sources—Bernstein 1965 and Chambers 1985—remind us that acquaint should be followed by with. It was not always so. Johnson's Dictionary (1798 ed.) for the sense Johnson defined "To inform" carries this note: " With is more in use before the object, than of." He includes a quotation from Shakespeare using of Actually, the construction acquaint someone could also be used with a clause introduced by that or even a contact clause. Shakespeare uses all four possibilities, but even with him with is the most common. The OED shows the construction with that from Fielding and Sir Walter Scott but calls the construction with of obsolete. The of construction is not quite obsolete, but it is certainly of very low frequency: • I'll presently acquaint the Queen of your most noble offer—Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 1611 • ... acquainted him formally of the honour which Providence and Sr. Azana had in store for him —E. Allison Peers, Spanish Tragedy 1930-1936, 1936 Here are examples of acquaint with a that clause and a contact clause: • I must acquaint you that I have received new-dated letters —Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 1598 • May I be bold to acquaint his Grace you are gone about it? —Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 1603 But with predominates, from Shakespeare's time to our own: • Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows — Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1612 • ... his near relation to you makes you more particularly acquainted with his merits —Edmund Burke, speech, 1780, in Burke's Speeches at Bristol, ed. Edward Bergin, 1916 • Any young gentlemen and ladies, who wish to acquaint themselves with the English language — Noah Webster, quoted in Horace E. Scudder, Noah Webster, 1882 • ... you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818 • ... not very well acquainted with our Parliamentary or political affairs —Sir Winston Churchill, The Unrelenting Struggle, 1942 • ... music-lovers who are thoroughly acquainted with Bruckner —Winthrop Sargeant, Saturday Rev., 28 Aug. 1954 • ... to acquaint a boy with how to use tools and handle materials —James B. Conant, Slums and Suburbs, 1961 • His interest in modern writers acquainted him with such philosophers as Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau —Edmund White, NY. Times Book Rev., 19 June 1983 2. Acquaint is one of the terms Gowers 1948 found overworked in British governmental prose; Chambers 1985 seems to take a similar line in suggesting acquaint with is rather formal for tell or inform and reporting that some people think acquaint someone with the facts is a cliché. British and American usage may differ in this regard, for Merriam-Webster files have little evidence of the supposed cliché. Many of our citations do, however, come from educational sources, in which there is often a tendency to bureaucratic prose. Gowers suggests tell or inform as substitutes, but acquaint, with its overtones of familiarity, cannot always be felicitously replaced. |
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