| 词组 | right |
| 释义 | right 1. This old and homely adverb (many of its senses go back to the time of King Alfred the Great) has bothered commentators—primarily American commentators—for about a century and a half. A number of senses have been found objectionable—often for being Americanisms or colloquialisms. Among the uses criticized are those illustrated here: • Michael was not going to strangle her right here — Daphne du Maurier, Ladies' Home Jour., August 1971 • McCarthyism came right at the end of World War II —David Halberstam, New Times, 16 May 1975 • You can drive your car right through the area where the animals roam free —Polly Bradley, Massachusetts Audubon, June 1968 • ... right now there are people that are willing to accept compromise —William Faulkner, 16 May 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 • I think I had better describe her right away —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1958 • He always went right ahead with his description of the violence he would do Uncle Andrew's assailant —Peter Taylor, The Old Forest and Other Stories, 1985 These uses are of course standard, and they are little disputed today, although Longman 1988 considers them more appropriate to speech than to writing, and Perrin & Ebbitt 1972 and Ebbitt & Ebbitt 1982 say they are common in general writing but not in formal writing. We agree with this last observation; we have plenty of written evidence for these uses of right, but the contexts in which they occur are not noticeably formal. Much of the attention given to adverbial right has concerned its use as an intensifier. This intensive use is old, too; the OED dates it from about 1200. It has a long literary pedigree: • I am right glad that he's so out of hope —Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1612 • ... those illustrious and right eloquent Pen-men, the Modern Travellers —Jonathan Swift, "A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," 1710 • Of his person and stature was the King A man right manly strong—Dante Gabriel Rossetti (in Hall 1917) In this country, for some reason, the spoken use of intensive right came to be a Southernism; it was attacked as a Southern corruption by a writer in the Boston Pearl in 1836 (cited in Thornton 1912). Hall 1917 names a number of turn-of-the-century grammarians and rhetoricians who identify it as provincial; several more recent handbooks call it colloquial or dialectal (especially Southern). American dialecticians identify it with Southern and Midland speech; Raven I. McDavid, Jr., in PADS (Publication of the American Dialect Society), April 1967, adds the Hudson Valley. Our latest British source, Longman 1988, calls it archaic or regional. If intensive right can be identified as a regionalism in speech, it is less easy to pin down in writing. Hall mentions the problem; he is perplexed as to how the comments of the rhetoricians can be squared with his examples collected from such poets as Tennyson, Browning, Lowell, Rossetti, and Swinburne. He surmises that perhaps the literary use can be ascribed mostly to writers who are fond of archaizing. Our evidence is different. We have, of course, a considerable amount of fictional speech, both dialectal and old-fashioned. And we have direct evidence from reported speech and from letters, presumably of people to whom Southern or Midland speech is native. The intensive right also appears in the discursive writing of these people. • I did not feel right comfortable for some time afterward —Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869 (A Mark Twain Lexicon, 1938) • It is right hard to understand what he says —Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground, 1925 • He was a man for detail, and he did a right competent job of stage management —The Autobiography of William Allen White, 1946 • It took a right smart bug to find a safe place to hide —Frank J. Taylor, Saturday Evening Post, 26 July 1958 • I am right embarassed to think every story is the best —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 6 Mar. 1959 • Again Hamilton, in the shining armor of his genius, rides right gallantly upon the scene —Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson in Power, 1936 • I know I whine right regularly over things about our town that are no more —Celestine Sibley, Atlanta Constitution, 19 Sept. 1984 So far we have quoted people we either know or assume to have been born in the Southern and Midland speech areas. The following examples, however, appear to be anomalous from the geographical standpoint: • ... a right merry letter it was too —Emily Dickinson, letter, 21 Oct. 1847 • I should like right well to make a longer excursion on foot —Henry David Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada, 1866 (OED) • ... enabled him to carry himself in right royal fashion —Jack London, The Call of the Wild, 1903 And, of course, right is sometimes used, like ain't and allow as how, in a deliberately casual or pseudo-dialectal style: • They are right pleased about it, too —Changing Times, February 1952 • He moved nimbly among the delegates, chanting: "Peanuts, popcorn, chewing gum, cigars, cigarettes!" He did right well for a lad of 11 —Newsweek, 18 June 1956 • ... a defender of the language—you remember, he defended it right profitably in his earlier Strictly Speaking —William Cole, Saturday Rev., 13 Nov. 1976 • Oh no, they came out of the box right smartly —Paul Zimmerman, Sports Illustrated, 12 Nov. 1983 The usage is not unknown in British English, but more common, apparently, is an intensive adjective use approximately equivalent to the American's real: • You can get in a right muddle of commas when lists include phrases in apposition —Howard 1984 Clearly we do not know everything there is to know about the intensive right. That it is in some respects a regionalism is evident, but no simple label seems adequate to describe the range of its common use, or to account for its use outside that range by such writers as New England's Emily Dickinson and San Francisco's Jack London. In practical terms, if the intensive right is part of your native dialect, you should of course feel free to use it without qualm when it seems appropriate, even in writing. It has a long and honorable history and an impressive literary background, and our evidence shows that it is fairly common in current writing, especially in writing that has a light and informal style. 2.Right, rightly. See wrong, wrongly. |
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