| 词组 | alternate, alternative |
| 释义 | alternate, alternative The adjectives alternate and alternative, say many commentators, are often confused; they advise keeping them separate. The senses recommended are "occurring or succeeding by turns" for alternate, and "offering or expressing a choice" for alternative. But not much light is shed on how these words are confused, if indeed they are, nor on what actual use is. We will begin our examination with Fowler 1926. Fowler says that alternative (and alternatively) "had formerly, besides their present senses, those now belonging" to alternate (and alternately). He claims that the two words are now (in 1926) completely differentiated, a claim somewhat vitiated by his following it immediately with an example, presumably from some British newspaper, of alternatively meaning "by turns." This violation of his dictum he terms "confusion." There are two separate considerations here. The first is the use of alternative where alternate might be expected; the second, alternate where alternative might be expected. The first use is, so far as we know, the oldest sense of the adjective alternative, attested in 1540. Johnson missed it in his 1755 dictionary, but Todd added it in his expanded edition at the beginning of the 19th century. Robert Herrick used it in a poem: • That Happines do's still the longest thrive Where Joye and Griefs have Turns Alternative.—Hesperides, 1648 This sense of the adjective is now quite rare, and it survives chiefly in the form of its derived adverb: • ... the door-knob, wherein oil and rust alternatively soothed and retarded the scrape of metal upon metal —Elinor Wylie, Jennifer Lorn, 1923 • In one hand she held a peeled hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of bread and butter in the other, and between her sentences she bit at them alternatively —Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay, 1923 • There are two courses open to them, which can be taken alternatively, sequentially or together —Margaret Mead, Saturday Evening Post, 3 Mar. 1962 The second use—that of alternate where alternative might be expected—is a more vexatious one to trace. The OED marks the sense obsolete, citing only Robert Greene ( 1590). But it seems to have had a revival in the second third of the 20th century. Our earliest citations for this revival do not, unfortunately, include much in the way of context; they supply more in the way of opinion than information. In 1933 a column in the Literary Digest termed the phrase "an alternate bill of goods" incorrect, but did not provide enough context to show just what was being referred to, spending most of its space on the explication of the difference between alternate and alternative. A letter from linguist Dwight L. Bolinger to this company in 1943 mentions alternate as a euphemism for substitute in alternate goods: again not much actual context is supplied but such information as is given suggests that both phrases may have been commercial terms used in retail advertising at the time. The revival was not strictly an American phenomenon, however; Gowers 1948 complains of its occurrence in official British writing. American citations begin to show up in some numbers in the 1940s and early 1950s. Among these there are three new categories of use where alternative had not been (and would not be) used—book clubs: His Collected Stories, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection —Time, 18 Dec. 1950 politics: • ... was named alternate United States delegate to the fifth General Assembly of the United Nations — Current Biography 1950 and highways: • ... an alternate route, built by the Federal Government in 1932 —American Guide Series: Virginia, 1941 These three uses continue to the present, with no competition from alternative. More general uses also appeared about the same time: • Right now, the U.N. weighs the advantage of having Russia at its conference table against the alternate advantage of having a set of basic principles on which members are agreed —New Yorker, 31 Mar. 1951 • Early copper shortages stimulated manufacturers to investigate alumnium as an alternate material — Bulletin, American Institute of Architects, March 1952 • The book also contains the complete alternate lyrics —Saturday Rev., 29 Nov. 1952 • But they found an alternate, and very free-trade, way of expressing themselves—the smuggling of opium —Christopher Rand, New Yorker, 29 Mar. 1952 • ... certain forms have considerable prestige as compared with alternate forms for practically the same meaning —C. C. Fries, cited by Harry R. Warfel, in Who Killed Grammar?, 1952 Such uses as these, from much the same kinds of sources, continue unabated in current use, at least in the U.S. In addition, the antiestablishment use of the 1960s—alternative journalism, alternative schools, and the like—is expressed by both adjectives, with alternative somewhat more common. The evidence in the Merriam-Webster files shows this curious tendency: alternative is becoming more and more a noun, and the adjective appears to be in the process of being replaced (at least in American English) by alternate. Except in botany, the adjective alternate in its sense "by turns" is giving way to the verb alternate and its participle alternating. We cannot be sure that this trend will continue, but if it does, differentiation, far from having been complete in 1926, will have continued along markedly different lines from those announced by Fowler. |
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