| 词组 | being, being as, being as how, being that |
| 释义 | being, being as, being as how, being that If your regional dialect or personal vocabulary does not include the conjunction being or its compound forms, you might very well wonder at the wide coverage these terms receive in handbooks. But covered they are: Reader's Digest 1983, Macmillan 1982, Nickles 1974, Janis 1984, Bremner 1980, Irmscher 1976, Bell and Cohn 1981, Corder 1981, Prentice Hall 1978, Shaw 1970, 1975, Guth 1980, 1985, Copperud 1970, McMahan & Day 1980, Little, Brown 1980. And these are only the fairly recent ones. Even a British dictionary, Longman 1984, comments on them. The epithets usually applied to the terms are "nonstandard," "substandard," "barbarian," and "illiterate." One essayist (Paul Fussell, "Notes on Class," in The Contemporary Essay, 1984) finds being that "pseudo-genteel." He is alone. Only the first two listed books, Reader's Digest and Macmillan, correctly identify these as dialectal. The conjunctions being, being as, and being that had at least some literary use in the 16th and 17th centuries: • Sir John, you loiter here too long, being you are to take soldiers up in counties as you go —Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 1598 Being that I flow in grief, • The smallest twine may lead me—Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 1599 And being you have • Declined his means, you have increased his malice —Beaumont and Fletcher (Webster 1909) The OED has citations from Sir Thomas More, a prose work of Milton's, and some other 17th-century prose writers. The conjunctive being and its compound forms seem to have been used mostly in prose—notes in our files show them used by John Bunyan and Jeremy Taylor, for instance—but we have almost no evidence of their being used in poetry. The OED shows no examples from the 18th century—presumably the forms faded into dialect during that time. British evidence from the 19th century is mostly dialectal—the English Dialect Dictionary has abundant evidence—with occasional other use. The EDD cites Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho (1855) for being that; the same form turns up in Jane Austen's correspondence: • Southey's Life of Nelson;—I am tired of Lives of Nelson, being that I never read any. I will read this, however, if Frank is mentioned in it —letter, 11 Oct. 1813 The Dictionary of American English and Dictionary of American Regional English both record 17th-century citations from Rhode Island; obviously these forms came here with early settlers. But after one early 18th-century citation, the rest of the evidence is 19th-century or later, and mainly dialectal. The DARE notes that currently these forms are chiefly Southern, South Midland, and New England. Our current evidence shows that these forms turn up from time to time in print, chiefly in the indicated dialect areas. The media in which they appear are essentially informal—letters, transcribed speech, newspaper articles. Here are a few samples: • Being she isn't about to mingle with other domestics in the servants' mess, Bobo's meals are brought to her suite —Fred Sparks, Springfield (Mass.) Union, 30 Mar. 1971 • Being as the exploitation began at the same time [in] almost every watershed there was simply not enough people —Warren Wright, quoted in Our Appalachia, 1977 • While I was in NC I heard somebody recite a barroom ballad. I don't remember anything but the end but beinst you all are poets I will give it to you — Flannery O'Connor, letter, 1 Apr. 1955 • That is when the kids get up early—naturally they get up early on Saturday mornings, being as how that is one of the two days in the week they do not have to get up early —George V. Higgins, Boston Globe Mag., 21 Oct. 1979 • I was appreciative that any woman would come onstage in that state, being that it was the state of California —Martin Mull, quoted in Rolling Stone, 17 July 1975 The people quoted are two New Englanders, a Ken-tuckian, a Georgian, and the anomalous Martin Mull, who was born in Chicago. Flannery O'Connor's beinst is a variant spelling based on pronunciation (she spelled it beingst once, too). It is clear that the conjunction being survives dialec-tally in current English. If it—or its compounds—is part of your dialect, there is no reason you should avoid it. You should be aware, however, that when you use it in writing it is likely to be noticed by those who do not have it in their dialects. |
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