| 词组 | barbarism |
| 释义 | barbarism In the simpler times of Campbell 1776 the rhetorical world had a symmetry and balance we can only admire now. Purity of expression, he said, implies three things, and accordingly it may be injured in three ways: by barbarisms, solecisms, and improprieties. Continuing the tripartite organization, Campbell found three kinds of barbarisms: the use of obsolete words, the use of new words, and the use of words "new-modelled"—cobbled up out of existing words or word elements. This classification of barbarisms was thereafter solemnly repeated from book to book and could be found as late as A. S. Hill 1895. By the time Fowler 1926 was writing, the first two of Campbell's barbarisms were no longer a subject of debate, even though they might be listed in rhetoric texts. The barbarisms that Fowler wrote about were compounds that violated the principles of classical word formation, usually by being compounded from Greek and Latin elements, or English in combination with Greek or Latin. Among the words that Fowler lists as disputed on this ground are bureaucrat, cablegram, electrocute, and Pleistocene; more recent examples are speedometer and television. Fowler, as a man educated in the classics, does not approve the coming of barbarisms, but he considers complaining about them a waste of time. Most people do not know television or bureaucrat to be malformed words; they just use them when they need to and go about their business. Fowler recognizes this, too, and the realization underlies his refusal to get overly exercised by the subject. And in actual fact, the fuss is over nothing: there is no requirement handed down from Dionysius Thrax or Priscian that forces English to form its words according to the principles obtaining for Greek or Latin. English follows its own processes of word formation. We have no particular evidence to show that even writers on usage and grammar have applied the term barbarism with anything approaching precision; in fact they no longer even define it with precision: • A barbarism is an obviously incorrect use of words, usually illiterate or eccentric rather than vulgar — Lee T. Lemon, A Glossary for the Study of English, 1971 • A barbarism is an expression in the mouth of an educated speaker which is so at variance with good sense and good usage that it startles the hearer —Follett 1966 Here we see that not only Campbell's notion of the word has been lost, but also Fowler's more restricted sense. The term has simply become an epithet of disparagement, a handy club for the usagist or reviewer to use in belaboring some poor expression or author. Here are a few examples, from Fowler's sense down to the modern: • But "antibody" has no such respectable derivation. It is, in fact, a barbarism, and a mongrel at that — Quiller-Couch 1916 • ... even preachers sometimes are guilty of barbarisms in pronunciation —Andrew Thomas Weaver, Speech—Forms and Principles, 1942 • ... never slips into the jargon or barbarisms that have disfigured some recent social history —R. K. Webb, NY. Times Book Rev., 1 Apr. 1984 • Surely we can agree, at least, that 'different than' is a solecism and a barbarism? —Howard 1984 |
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