| 词组 | allude |
| 释义 | allude 1. Allude has been the subject of much commentary since sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. Richard Grant White 1870 is the earliest critic in our library to discuss the subject, but Bardeen 1883 lists two sources from the 1860s, so White was not the originator. The gist of the 19th-century argument is that allude has a certain subtle meaning—"delicate" is White's term—involving indirection and wordplay that has been sullied if not entirely spoiled by the unlettered and unwashed, who cannot tell the difference between allude and say, mention, name, speak of. Around the turn of the century there is a slight shift in the wind: the new commentators (Vizetelly 1906, Bierce 1909, Utter 1916, for instance) abandon the lament for what is being lost and turn to straightforward prescription. "One can allude to a thing only indirectly," says Utter 1916; "What is alluded to is not mentioned, but referred to indirectly," says Bierce 1909. And so it goes, down to the present: "To allude to is to refer to indirectly" (Prentice Hall 1978); "To allude is to make indirect mention of something" (Corder 1981); "Allude means to refer to a person or thing indirectly or by suggestion" (Macmil-lan 1982). "Allude is often misused for refer," says Copperud 1970, 1980. What is most important for you as a modern reader or writer to realize about these commentators—the distant and the recent alike—is that their whole argument is based on a set of false assumptions. First is the assumption of the primacy of the etymology. White insists that allude must involve wordplay because the word is derived from the Latin alludere "to play with." Vizetelly 1906 also talks at length about the etymology, but Bierce 1909 dismisses it: "That meaning is gone out of it." And indeed it had. The OED shows 1607 as the date of the latest example of allude used for wordplay. The second false assumption is that the ignorant and uneducated are responsible for the "direct" sense (as opposed to the prescribed "indirect" sense). Even the OED subscribes to this view. Only Lounsbury 1908 has looked carefully enough to recognize that the sense has "been employed not simply by ordinary men, but by speakers and writers of high cultivation, and in a few instances of high authority." Examples of this class of use are given below in the course of the discussion. The third false assumption is that the new "direct" use has driven or will drive the old subtle sense out of the language. The fact is that it has done no such thing in well over 100 years. You can use the "indirect" sense just as well today as you could two centuries ago: • You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating —Joan Didion, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 5 Dec. 1976 The fourth false assumption is that the "direct" use is a misuse. It is not. It is simply a logical extension from the indirect use, and indeed is an inevitable development from the surviving senses of allude—inevitable from the very indirectness of the earlier use. Why inevitable? you may ask. Most readers, even those who later become authors, learn the use of words from the contexts in which they find them. Allude is often found in contexts in which it is not possible to know for certain whether the word is to be taken in its "indirect" sense or not. Some examples are offered here. In the first, those readers familiar with what Dr. Johnson said of Goldsmith will know if allude here is indirect or direct; others will not: • He had ... none of that charm of style to which Dr. Johnson alluded when he wrote of Goldsmith, that he touched nothing he did not adorn —Thomas Sec-combe, Introduction to Everyman edition of George Borrow's Lavengro, 1906 • I wonder if you and Mrs. Aubrey Moore will ever allude to your acceptance of an invitation which she declined —Lewis Carroll, letter, 16 Nov. 1896 • ... it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts —Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence , 1920 • Never once did he allude to the reason for her visit —Daphne du Maurier, Ladies' Home Jour., September 1971 • ... but Boswell never heard Johnson allude to the matter —John Wain,.Samuel Johnson, 1974 • The resemblance between the two was strong, except that Dolly had a bust—a difference she alluded to several times —Jay Mclnerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984 In these contexts—which are of common occurrence— the reader is not given enough clues to identify one meaning or the other. These passages are not in the least incorrect or carelessly written—they are simply too general to help discriminate fine shades of meaning. Then too, the very indirectness of reference of allude has contributed to the development of the direct sense. We will illustrate this with a passage written by John Adams; his use of allude is a textbook example— indeed, he probably could not have chosen a different word. But please notice where the actual allusion occurs with respect to where allude appears: • I concluded with a motion, in form, that Congress would adopt the army at Cambridge, and appoint a General; that though this was not the proper time to nominate a General, yet, as I had reason to believe this was a point of the greatest difficulty, I had no hesitation to declare that I had but one gentleman in my mind for that important command, and that was a gentleman from Virginia who was among us and very well known to all of us, a gentleman whose skill and experience as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents, and excellent universal character, would command the approbation of all America, and unite the cordial exertions of all the Colonies better than any other person in the Union. Mr. Washington, who happened to sit near the door, as soon as he heard me allude to him, from his usual modesty, darted into the library-room —reprinted in The Practical Cogitator, ed. Charles P. Curtis, Jr. & Ferris Greenslet, 1945 This passage demonstrates that when the indirect sense of allude is clearly the one being used, the indirect reference itself is very likely to occur well ahead of the word. And if you begin reading in the middle, or if part of the passage is excerpted, you may never realize the care with which allude was selected. Allude to has another sense—approximately "to mention in passing"—that the handbooks (but not the large dictionaries) tend to overlook. Here is a classic example of the use from George Jean Nathan: • If, suffering from a selfish conviction that I was doing too great a share of the work, I wrote him somewhat acrimoniously to that effect, instead of making matters worse by replying directly to the idiotic contention all that he would do would be to send me a lengthy list of his ailments, thus breaking my heart, together with some such irrelevant footnote as, "I hope you put aside a case of that Roederer against my birthday, which occurs on September 12th. In general, as you know, I detest birthday prèsents, but mature reflection has led me to conclude that I should make an exception of wines and liquors of high tone." • I have alluded to his maladies. —The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan, 1932 Nathan, having mentioned the maladies in passing, goes on then to expand upon the subject considerably. This use of allude is not rare—it is accounted for by definitions in the OED and Webster's Third. Again we find the allusion itself placed at some distance from allude. In our next example, from Thackeray, the actual allusion (in the edition at hand) is on the preceding page: • It is not snobbish of persons of rank of any other nation to employ their knife in the manner alluded to — The Book of Snobs, 1846 The manner alluded to involves the use of the knife to eat peas with. Between the description of the act and Thackeray's resumption of the subject on the next page there is interposed a considerable bit of matter devoted to Thackeray's social relationship with the man who so used his knife. But the allusion is not, in fact, merely mentioned in passing—it is the chief motivating action of the essay. Thackeray's allusion is at once more remote—physically—and less casual than Nathan's. (And even Nathan's reference has been purposely planted to supply a bridge to the further discussion of maladies.) From a variety of rhetorical strategies or unintended effects, then, the "indirect" sense can shade into the "direct" sense; they are, so to speak, simply different parts of a continuum. There does not appear to be anything out of the ordinary in the development, and, given the number of ambiguous examples likely to be encountered, it hardly seems possible that allude could have continued pure in the narrow stream of signification the commentators had laid out for it. What we have in reality is a word with three interrelated uses—indirect, casual, direct—that can shade into one another imperceptibly. We conclude this exegesis with a selection of examples from this century and the last—most of them considerably shorter than the preceding examples— some of which will fit obviously into one or another of the three categories of use, and some of which will not. They are all impeccably standard. • She alluded once or twice to her husband but her tone was not such as to make the allusion a warning —James Joyce, Dubliners, 1914 • He ascribed the poverty of her attire to the attempts to keep herself respectable, which Ellen during supper had more than once alluded to —Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903 • Hazlitt has written a grammar for Godwin; Godwin sells it bound up with a treatise of his own on language, but the grey mare is the better horse. I don't allude to Mrs. Godwin, but to the word grammar — Charles Lamb, letter, 2 Jan. 1810 • Never once did she allude to anything that had occurred since her marriage —Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground, 1925 • He never alluded so directly to his story again —E. E. Hale, The Man Without A Country, 1863 • ... that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments —Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," 1839 • He writhes when anyone so much as hints at a reference to his work, and actually groans aloud today when V. alludes to a dramatization of Brave New World —Robert Craft, Stravinsky, 1972 • She remembered what a sweet, lovely, polite girl my sister was, and was shocked that I should be so thoughtless as to write as I had about her intimate life, especially to make jokes about her unfortunate tendency to gain weight. Since unlike Alexander Portnoy, I happen never to have had a sister, I assumed it was some other Jewish Athena with a tendency to gain weight to whom my correspondent was alluding —Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 1975 • At one of the plenary sessions, Churchill alluded obliquely to his idea —New Statesman & Nation, 19 Dec. 1953 • ... sexual matters only obliquely alluded to —Howard Kissel, Women's Wear Daily, 25 Oct. 1976 • ... proposals, which were never called proposals, but always alluded to slightingly as innovations — Compton Mackenzie, The Parson's Progress, 1923 • "... The trouble with fruit, though, is that it gives him that intestinal condition I alluded to." —Jean Stafford, Children Are Bored on Sunday, 1945 • To be such a master of the inward richness of words is to take visionary possession of the things to which the words allude —Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere, 1966 • ... the records of the colony allude to beer as one of its commodities —Dictionary of American History, 1940 • This theory is alluded to in the title; it is explicitly stated, by my count, at least thirty times in the book —David Littlejohn, Commonweal, 30 Jan. 1970 • ... serves as a kind of fable, to which the rest of the novel will repeatedly allude in one way or another — Times Literary Supp., 1 Nov. 1968 • I'm bound to allude to some classic of literature whether it's Pindar or Homer or Virgil —Erich Segal, quoted in Vogue, 1 Aug. 1971 By now you will have a good enough sense of how allude is actually used to be able to ignore with safety the blinkered directions of the handbooks. 2.Allude, elude. MacCracken & Sandison 1917 warn against confusing allude and elude. The verbs sound about the same, but differ considerably in meaning, as a glance at your dictionary will demonstrate. We do have evidence that they are occasionally confused: • ... widespread recognition has alluded Larry Sparks —Bluegrass Unlimited, February 1982 If you are doubtful, get out that dictionary. |
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