| 词组 | advocate |
| 释义 | advocate 1. Bernstein 1965 tells us the noun advocate takes the preposition of, the verb for. Both these generalizations are off the mark. Advocate the verb is used almost entirely as a transitive verb and usually takes no preposition at all. When a prepositional phrase does happen to follow the direct object, the preposition can be for but can just as easily be in, on, or by, among others: • While Henry advocates federal loan programs for individual needy students —Current Biography, June 1966 The use of for is seen when advocate is intransitive, but the intransitive is fairly rare. The OED (which marks it obsolete) does show citations with for: three from the 17th century and one from the 19th: • I am not going to advocate for this sense of actual —Fitzedward Hall, Recent Exemplifications of False Philology, 1872 The noun advocate most usually takes of to show what is being advocated: • ... advocates of our disastrous military-oriented policies in Asia —Chester Bowles, Saturday Rev., 6 Nov. 1971 • ... wrong if he takes me as an advocate of amorality in the conduct of foreign policy —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Harper's, October 1971 • ... as an advocate of probity and thrift he could be seen splitting wood in front of his house each morning —John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957 For is also used sometimes to indicate what is being advocated: • ... is an advocate for the extended use of psychiatry in the field of law —Morris L. Ernst, New Republic, 8 June 1953 • I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions —John Morley, in The Practical Cogitator, ed. Charles P. Curtis, Jr. & Ferris Greenslet, 1945 More often, though, for indicates on whose behalf one advocates: • Let them ... be advocates for their organizations — Leslie H. Gelb & Morton H. Halperin, Harper's, June 1972 • ... the responsibility of acting as a personal advocate for his chief —McGeorge Bundy, in Preface to The Pattern of Responsibility, 1951 • Young Heinrich became a sort of advocate for his people before the tribunal of Mr. Britling's mind — H. G. Wells, Mr. Brit ling Sees It Through, 1916 With may be used for the authority to whom one advocates a cause: • And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins —1 John 2:1-2 (AV), 1611 • ... promising to act as his advocate with Katherine —James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century, 1969 • We are their advocate with the credit company — unidentified spokesperson, NBC Radio News, 9 June 1974 2. A couple of issues of some historical interest adhere to advocate. In the late 18th century the verb advocate was supposed to be an American innovation. Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Noah Webster in December 1798 described to advocate as an innovation he had encountered only upon his return from France; he asked Webster to reprobate the word (along with several other innovations—to notice, to progress, to oppose—that are perfectly standard today). An English traveler named Henry Wamsey in 1794 also noted to advocate as a novelty. The verb was not entered in Johnson's Dictionary of 1755, but H. J. Todd added it in his expanded version of Johnson published early in the 19th century. Todd remarks that a Mr. Boucher gave credit to Americans for this particular enrichment of English; Todd says they do not deserve the credit, since the word was used by Milton and Burke. But Mencken 1963 (abridged) notes it was attacked as an Americanism by Robert Southey as late as 1838. All this and more can be found, more entertainingly recounted, in Mencken. Fowler 1926, 1965 asserts that advocate, unlike recommend, propose, urge, is not idiomatically followed by a that-clause. In fact, although clauses are considerably less common than nouns and gerunds as direct objects, they are not in the least unidiomatic: • ... he used the occasion to join Walter Reuther in advocating that organized labor in the United States work within the Democratic party —Current Biography, November 1966 • The officers advocate that the large, unwieldy units be replaced by smaller ARVN mobile brigades — Robert Shaplen, New Yorker, 24 Apr. 1971 |
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