| 词组 | bemuse |
| 释义 | bemuse The OED cites a 1705 letter by Alexander Pope: When those incorrigible things, Poets, are once irrecoverably Be-mus'd Murray defines this use as "humorously, To devote entirely to the Muses." He defines the main sense as "To make utterly confused or muddled, as with intoxicating liquor ... to stupefy." The earliest citation is also from Pope, dated 1735. It is shown thus: • A parson much be-mus'd in beer. Dr. Johnson in his 1755 dictionary entered the word as an adjective bemused. He defined it "Overcome with musing; dreaming: a word of contempt." Johnson quotes Pope, too, but more fully: • Is there a parson much bemus'd in beer, A maudlin poetess, a rhiming peer? Noah Webster in 1828 picked up Johnson word for word but omitted the quotation. There is no question that Pope's 1735 usage is the springboard from which our modern use starts. Webster 1864, Webster 1890, and Webster 1909 all used the Pope quotation, truncated as it is in the OED. But it seems likely that the interpretation that has given us our modern meaning comes from taking Pope's line out of context. Here are the first 22 lines of An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, from which it comes: • Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd, I said, Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead. The Dog-star rages! nay 'tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out: Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, thro' my Grot they glide; By land, by water, they renew the charge; They stop the chariot, and they board the barge. No place is sacred, not the Church is free; Ev'n Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me; Then from the Mint walks forth the Man of rhyme, Happy to catch me just at Dinner-time. Is there a Parson, much bemus'd in beer, A maudlin Poetess, a rhyming Peer, A Clerk, foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, Who pens a Stanza, when he should engross? Is there, who, lock'd from ink and paper, scrawls With desp'rate charcoal round his darken'd walls? All fly to TWIT'NAM, and in humble strain Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain. In this context, where Pope is besieged by would-be poets who want him to read their verses, it seems quite likely that Pope is suggesting that the parson found his muse in beer—in other words, he is using bemused in much the same way he had in 1705. A parson who is simply muddled by beer would not make much sense in the larger context of the poem. Harper 1985 says that centuries ago amuse and bemuse were synonyms, but that they are no longer. This is not quite accurate. The OED shows that the usual senses of amuse in the 17th and 18th centuries were approximately "distract, mislead, deceive." These senses have fallen into disuse and during the 19th century seem to have been transferred to a certain extent to bemuse. Bemuse , then, is a somewhat slippery word. Harper 1975, 1985, Freeman 1983, and Bernstein 1977 warn against using bemuse as a synonym for amuse. We have no evidence that bemuse is actually equated with amuse. But, perhaps because of the word's uncertain origins, we have quite a few citations of uncertain meaning, uses that fall between the cracks of dictionary definitions. We will first show you a few mainstream citations, where the meaning is clear: • We know that the commission salesman will, if we let him into our homes, dazzle and bemuse us with the beauty, durability, unexcelled value of his product —Jessica Mitford, Atlantic, July 1970 • Ella stood with her sandals sinking into the beach, bemused and peaceful in her rapt look of mystery, tears streaming down her wrinkled face —William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness, 1951 • But it may be that he drinketh strong waters which do bemuse a man, and make him even as the wild beasts of the desert! — W. S. Gilbert, Ruddigore, 1887 • ... he, bemused in his Neoplatonism and rapt... in the "egotistical sublime" —Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry, 1975 • ... more serious claim is that the Soviet Union is marching irresistibly across a bemused and flabby world —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Saturday Rev., June 1980 Then we have ambiguous or uncertain uses. The first two are letters to the editor. The first of these could be interpreted as amused; however, our context is too short to be certain. The second starts out as though amused or even pleased is meant, but then a complaint follows. • I was initially bemused by your Aug. 14 front page story on the Dull Men's Club —letter to the editor, Wall Street Jour., 28 Aug. 1980 • It bemused me greatly to read In an otherwise representative piece, she neglected to give any mention to Canada's highly acclaimed classical musicians —letter to the editor, Vogue, October 1982 The rest of the examples were written by professionals but are equally ambiguous: • ... the band whose piledriver precision so bemused Composer Igor Stravinsky that he wrote his Ebony Concerto for it —Time, 31 May 1954 • ... we have a giddy child out to "blow his mind" and bemused to see all the pretty balloons go up — Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 1969 • There is probably no one in the world more bemused by the eccentric aspects of crime than the urbane, rubicund Alfred Hitchcock —Arthur Knight, Saturday Rev., 24 June 1972 • Some political analysts here [in Zimbabwe] are bemused at the naively gleeful reaction of many whites to the recent arrest —Tony Hawkins, Christian Science Monitor, 15 Aug. 1980 • Gable plays his he-man part with the bemused ease to be expected of a man who has done the same thing many times before —Time, 12 Oct. 1953 • He also began to develop an attitude toward whites, a kind of bemused disdain for their foolishness — Richard M. Levine, Harper's, March 1969 Part of the problem with bemuse may be that lexicographers have not analyzed its use as well as they should have. At least some of the above examples would fit into one of the obsolete senses of amuse that bemuse has presumably taken over: "to occupy the attention of, absorb." But while there seem to be several lexicographical loose ends to bemuse, we do not have convincing evidence that it often infringes on current senses of amuse. We merely advise you to note that it is a bit slippery to handle. |
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