| 词组 | alone |
| 释义 | alone From Ayres 1881 to Jensen 1935 a modest amount of objection was entered to alone meaning "only," as in • It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone —Luke 4:4 (AV), 1611 Jensen explains that the sense is not current; but in fact the sense was current in the 19th century when Ayres wrote, and is still current in carefully edited standard prose: • He alone lynches in cold blood —G. Legman, Love and Death, 1949 • ... not all of whom had their minds on baseball alone —Al Hirshberg, quoted in Current Biography, March 1965 • ... decided that fur trading alone would never make New Netherland a proper colony —Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People, 1965 Follett 1966 and Barzun 1975 try to tease some ambiguity out of sentences like those above in order to justify a preference for only that Ayres simply states. But when alone means "only", it regularly follows the noun it modifies. One can argue that • Davis now alone unites them —Henry Adams, letter, 23 Apr. 1863 is ambiguous, since it is not certain whether alone means "only" or "all by himself," but the ambiguity is really created by the intervention of now between the name and alone. Reverse the adjective and adverb, and presto—no more ambiguity. In any case, worrying about ambiguity here is worth little, because the sentence says essentially the same thing no matter which interpretation you give alone. When an author wants to emphasize "by oneself," alone is usually placed after a verb or copula: • She wished only to be alone —Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 1932 |
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