| 词组 | service |
| 释义 | service Many commentators disparage the use of the verb service in contexts where serve is also possible. They favor restricting service to those senses which are uniquely its own, especially "to repair or provide maintenance for," as in "service a car." This verb is not an old one in any of its senses. Its first recorded use was by Robert Louis Stevenson: • If I am to service ye the way that you propose, I'll lose my lifelihood —Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona, 1893 (OED Supplement) Stevenson used service in this one instance as a nonstandard synonym of serve. There is no further evidence of service as a verb until the 1920s, when the "repair or maintain" sense began to appear commonly in print: • Here we serviced the ship, as we had been out two hours and forty-five minutes —Aero Digest, August 1924 H. L. Mencken, in The American Language (4th ed., 1936), says that this sense was first used around 1910, when "American garages began servicing cars." Almost certainly it was a new coinage, unrelated to Stevenson's service. Further written evidence of the "serve" sense did not appear until the 1940s: • ... any town serviced by Greyhound bus — Esquire's Jazz Book, ed. Paul E. Miller, 1944 • ... the reduced-rate market now serviced by Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward —Victor Lebow, Harper's, July 1945 • Airports are so far from the cities they supposedly service —John Steinbeck, Russian Journal, 1948 (OED Supplement) Critics such as Copperud 1964, Bernstein 1965, Gowers in Fowler 1965, Shaw 1975, Phythian 1979, Bryson 1984, and Janis 1984 would presumably have advised Steinbeck to use serve instead. Nevertheless, the disapproved sense of service continues to be fairly common: • Some loan sharks service a neighborhood in the same fashion as a barber or shoe repairman —Donald R. Cressey, Harper's, February 1969 • ... increased its ability to service customers —William F. May, Annual Report, American Can Co., 1970 • ... need not spend a good half of his time ... servicing volunteers —Virginia H. Mathews, Publishers Weekly, 2 July 1973 • Many of those not in the energy business are also doing very nicely by servicing it —Tom Curtis, Town & Country, September 1979 • ... they end up by servicing the richer countries at the expense of their own ability to innovate —Richard J. Barnet, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 27 May 1984 |
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