| 词组 | all that |
| 释义 | all that The usage in question here is simply the adverbial that (see that 5) with the intensifier all added to it; it is almost always found in negative constructions: • ... Durham City ... had not changed all that much since medieval times —Sam Pollock, London Calling, 10 June 1954 • They are not all that worried now. They took Taft more seriously than Goldwater —C. L. Sulzberger, N.Y. Times, 9 Oct. 1963 Copperud 1970 cites himself, Bernstein 1965, and Heritage 1969 in disapproval, although he concedes that Fowler 1965 says it is approaching literary acceptance. Copperud claims the expression is a Briticism that sounds affected in the U.S. Mittins et al. 1970, on the other hand, cite a British usage book that says it is an Americanism. As you might expect from such contradictory statements, not all that is common on both sides of the Atlantic. • A large tomcat came along the gutter and found a fish head; he spurred it once or twice with his claws and then moved on: he wasn't all that hungry —Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent, 1939 • He likes to act country, but he don't have all that far to go—he is country —Eudora Welty, The Ponder Heart, 1954 • Piggy rebuked him with dignity. "I haven't said anything all that funny." —William Golding, Lord of the Flies, 1954 • ... took a look at the cemetery designed by the great Sir Joseph, but didn't think it all that impressive — Clémence Dane, The Flower Girls, 1954 • .. asking at the wrong time why they did not go back to their Banks and Braes, if they were all that fashed about the lack of them —Wilson Neill, Scots Mag., October 1957 • Slowly he becomes aware that the world isn't all that easy to conquer —Hollis Alpert, Saturday Rev., 3 Oct. 1964 • By itself, the temporary walkout was not all that important —Newsweek, 27 June 1966 • ... anything that it takes a computer to work out is not gong to be checked all that quickly —Times Literary Supp., 8 Sept. 1966 • Even here Johnson is not being all that original: wishes of exactly this sort are a well established eighteenth-century satiric convention —Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, 1971 • It was not that he would find life there dangerous or even, at the time, all that expensive —John Kenneth Galbraith, New York, 15 Nov. 1971 • Farmers are not used to theatre and they're not all that polite —Rick Salutin, in Canadian Theatre Rev., Spring 1975 • Separate diseases, even though they were recognized as distinct clinical entities and given different names, were not regarded as all that separate in their underlying mechanisms —Lewis Thomas, Atlantic, April 1981 • ... incredibly rich and tasty and not all that difficult to prepare —Craig Claiborne et al., N.Y. Times Mag., 24 Apr. 1983 Ebbitt & Ebbitt 1982 calls the construction "informal and imprecise"—complaining, as it were, about its primary virtues. It is used for understatement, sometimes with ironic intent. Harper 1975, 1985 and the survey of Mittins et al. agree in finding it unobjectionable in speech. Some of the foregoing examples are from real or fictional speech, but many are not. It has been used in fiction, in reportage, and occasionally in more serious writing. It appears to be established as standard. |
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