| 词组 | behoove, behove |
| 释义 | behoove, behove Those commentators who bring up the subject—Evans 1957, Bryson 1984—agree with the OED Supplement that behoove is the usual spelling in the U.S. and behove is the usual spelling in the U.K. Our evidence confirms the observation, our last British behoove and our last American behove both dating from the 1940s. Behoove and behove are usually found in impersonal constructions beginning with it: • ... it behooves us to conform to it out of deference to public opinion —Geoffrey Nunberg, Atlantic, December 1983 • ... it may behoove us at this time to re-examine the grounds —Charles G. Tierney, Saturday Rev., 18 Dec. 1971 • ... had informed me ... that it would behoove me not to swing violently at the ball —John Lowenstein, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 16 Aug. 1982 Any commentator who says beho(o)ve can take only it for a subject, however, is wrong—for instance, Phythian 1979, Sir Bruce Fraser in Gowers 1973, Bryson 1984, and Reader's Digest 1983. It is the usual subject, not the only possible one. Sometimes we find an example with a personal subject: • ... as good scientists we are behooved to discard this model with its fortuitously correct results —J. J. Zuckerman, Jour, of Chemical Education, April 1966 • ... one sees It so seldom one is behooved to be impressed —Liz Smith, Cosmopolitan, February 1972 Such uses are fairly uncommon, but are not wrong. Before criticizing other uses of beho(o)ve, critics should have looked in unabridged dictionaries. Bryson 1984 has taken from Fraser in Gowers 1973 an example of a sentence containing the construction "it ill behoves." Bryson and Fraser assume this must mean "become," but it need not, since one sense of beho(o)ve is "to be proper." The construction with ill is rare, however. Bryson and Fraser could come up with but a single example; our files likewise have just one, and that from a radio show. Ill behoove, we assume, must be chiefly in oral use. A few other comments have been made on the subject of this verb that we mention only for you to beware of. A 1927 survey of 227 judges reported in The English Journal called behoove illiterate, which it most certainly is not. A few of the British commentators think it old-fashioned or even archaic, but we continue to collect evidence of its use. Krapp 1927 called it "slightly archaic and literary." But it is not. TV Guide and Sports Illustrated, from which we have recent citations, are hardly literary in content. Behoove may not be the most common word in English, but it is still alive and kicking. |
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