| 词组 | beauteous |
| 释义 | beauteous You wouldn't think that this little-used synonym of beautiful would excite comment by usage writers, but it does. Fowler 1926 considers it a poeti-cism; Krapp 1927 says it is "archaic and poetical"; Flesch 1964 calls it "an ugly, barbaric word"; Copperud 1970, 1980 thinks it may have a derogatory tinge and may be intended to dilute a tribute; Harper 1985 says it is used chiefly by people trying for a bit of elegance. If you suspect that our most recent commentators are shooting in the dark, you are probably right. Beauteous is a word that has greatly decreased in literary use during the last couple of centuries. The OED shows that beauteous is an older word than beautiful, by nearly a century. A check into the concordances of several poets shows that in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, beauteous was more frequently used than beautiful. While Spenser used beautiful slightly more often than beauteous, Shakespeare and Marlowe both heavily favored beauteous; Jonson, Donne, Herrick, George Herbert, Milton, and Marvell all favored beauteous (a few didn't use beautiful at all); Thomas Traherne used both equally. In the 18th century Swift used beautiful slightly more than beauteous, but Pope and Johnson used beauteous much more often. With the onset of Romanticism the preference shifted. Blake used beautiful 97 times to 7 for beauteous; Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth all preferred beautiful, using beauteous only occasionally. The Romantics seem to have set the tone: later 19th century poets such as Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson all used beautiful more often. By the 20th century the switch was complete: Milton and Donne did not use beautiful; Dylan Thomas did not use beauteous. The evidence of the concordances shows that sometime around the beginning of the 19th century beautiful surpassed beauteous as the literary word of choice, and the use of the older word has dwindled since. Thus the uncertainty of recent commentators: they do not meet the word very often and are puzzled what to make of it when they do. Our recent evidence is too scanty to base many generalizations on, so we can neither confirm nor refute the suspicions of Copperud and Harper. The only intended effect we have noticed is its use in a couple of New York Times reviews (both quoted below) to suggest earlier times. Here are some examples—first a few of the older literary uses, and then some more recent ones. • Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds—Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ca. 1590 • How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world — Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1612 • The one as famous for a scolding tongue As is the other for beauteous modesty—Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 1594 • Now beauteous Daphnis cloath'd with heav'nly light —Samuel Johnson, "The Hymns to Daphnis from the Fifth Pastoral of Virgil," 1726 • Was high-born, wealthy by her father's will, And beauteous, even where beauties most abound —Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto xiii, 1823 • As light and beauteous as a squirrel —William Wordsworth, "Peter Bell—A Tale," 1819 • ... the orchestral playing was of the beauteous kind that only Boston gives us regularly any more —Virgil Thomson, The Musical Scene, 1947 • There is music and dance and beauteous liberation in that shop —Thomas J. Cottle, Saturday Rev., 19 June 1971 • This time, we're in early 19th-century Styria. Car-milla, the beauteous, last descendant of the undead Karnstein nobility ... —A. H. Weiler, TV. Y. Times, 4 Feb. 1971 • And the Incredible Merlin the Magician is preparing for his joust with Feste, the fire-eating fool, by making beauteous damsels levitate and disappear —Nan Robertson, N.Y. Times, 4 May 1979 • ... out on Rhode Island Sound 10 beauteous 12-meter yachts raced —Sarah Pileggi, Sports Illustrated, 8 Aug. 1983 We can see no sneaky pejorative intent or overblown elegance in these recent citations. Beauteous is a word that is no longer much used, though it is not archaic. Perhaps you could use it for an old-fashioned effect, but beautiful will always be safe. |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。