| 词组 | sneak, snuck |
| 释义 | sneak, snuck Sneak is a word of mysterious origin. It first turns up in Shakespeare: • Sneak not away, sir; for the friar and you must have a word —Measure for Measure, 1605 It seems to have no sure antecedents. There is a possible source in Old English—a verb snican, of similar meaning. But Old English strong verbs of the class that snican belongs to came into modern English with -ike (as strike from strican), and there is no evidence extant in Middle English to connect sneak with snican. The original past and past participle of sneak were regular, sneaked. But sometime in the late 19th century a variant irregular form, snuck, began to appear in the United States. • ... an' den snuck home —The Lantern (New Orleans), 17 Dec. 1887 The Lantern citation is the earliest yet uncovered. The American Dialect Society turned up a few examples from around the turn of the century. The earliest printed citation in the Merriam-Webster files dates from 1902: • Dock Knowital he Snuck Out the room an' Disappeared —Frank W. Sage, D.D.S., Dental Digest, November 1902 A decade later, snuck appeared in the stories of Ring Lardner: • ... I snuck off down the street and got something to eat —Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al, 1916 While Lardner's characters used snuck, those of this older contemporary O. Henry used sneaked: • I knew what it meant; so I climbed down and sneaked a five dollar bill into the hand of a man with a German silver star on his lapel —O. Henry, The Gentle Grafter, 1908 From these sparse pieces of evidence it appears that the few authors who had heard snuck considered it typical of the speech of rural and not overly educated Americans and they used it in generally humorous contexts. The members of the American Dialect Society who began collecting examples early in this century clearly assumed snuck to be a dialectal form. Novelists did too. From the 1930s on, snuck turns up in novels set in such various places as Tennessee, Ohio, and New England, often around the Civil War period. From the evidence we now have, use of snuck in a mid-19th-century setting would appear to be anachronistic. Eventually snuck began to appear in contexts with a different purpose—not representing the comical speech of a bumpkin or the supposed dialect of a fictional character in the past, but in journalistic prose where it seems to be used for a lightening or humorous effect: • ... photographers snuck up and took pictures of the inventor sound asleep and snoring in the middle of the day —N. Y. Herald Tribune Book Rev., 22 Jan. 1939 • ... I attended a fashion show the other day. I snuck in like a sneak —Vincent X. Flaherty, Los Angeles Examiner, 6 Apr. 1952 From such uses, it shortly began to appear in other kinds of contexts: • A wry smile snuck across Johnny's freckles, as his straight blond hair blew in the soft tradewind — Boy's Life, June 1953 • He snuck the Hearst collection away from Macy's, you know —an unnamed GimbePs executive, quoted in New Yorker, 17 Feb. 1951 • ... I really hammed it up. I snuck an extra blanket under my bedspread, making sure I'd sweat plenty —William Goldman, Temple of Gold, 1957 Since the 1950s, snuck has appeared with increasing frequency in newspapers and magazines, primarily in straightforward contexts without humorous overtones. Two language surveys in the 1970s, one in Canada and one in the United States, revealed the use of snuck to be widespread—not restricted geographically—and to be more common among younger informants. If we assume that the younger informants will continue to use it as they grow older, it would seem that snuck stands a good chance to become the dominant form of the past and past participle. The results of these surveys corroborate the evidence in the Merriam-Webster files. But where does snuck come from? We don't know; it is as mysterious as the origin of sneak itself. The only evidence that we have suggests snuck is a late 19th-century North American innovation. One theory suggests it may have been a survival in some obscure northern English or Scottish dialect brought here by settlers. It is tempting to trace it from Old English snican; Old English strīcan of the same class of strong verbs gave us strike and struck; there is at least one surviving instance of Middle English snike (pronounced \\\\snē-kǝ\\\\), around 1240, which is clearly derived from snican. But no evidence survives to connect either sneak or snuck conclusively to snican and snike. It is a long time from 1240 to 1887. Usage commentators were slow to discover snuck. Krapp 1927 noted a dialectal past and past participle snuk, which suggests he had not seen the word in print (he evidently did not read Ring Lardner). There seems to be no other comment until the 1970s when a few critics (Shaw 1970, Bernstein 1977, Harper 1976) offer remarks indicating they were aware of the way the word was being used in Ring Lardner's time. In summary we can say that in about a century snuck has gone from an obscure and probably dialectal variant of the past and past participle to a standard, widely used variant that is about as common as the older sneaked. Some evidence suggests it may become the predominant form in North American English. Occurrence in British English is rare but not unknown. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the rise of snuck to respectability than a comparison of Dr. Sage's 1902 use quoted early in this article with more recent ones: Entitlements is a word that snuck into the political lexicon with few considering what it meant — Wall Street Jour., 27 Mar. 1981 • ... half the programme was unfortunately devoted to a penetrating interview with the star, which is obviously how the programme snuck into the arts slot —Bart Mills, The Listener, 30 Jan. 1975 • When I was a teenager, I snuck off to the movies as often as possible. I would come out of some heady piece of derring-do and walk down the prosaic streets of my home town, quite altered by what I had just seen, fantasizing myself thoroughly into one of the characters —Robert MacNeil, Presentation Address at the James E. Scripps Award Ceremony, Detroit, 30 Apr. 1981 • But, again, Ruddock has snuck his unexpected and modern signature into these rooms —Carol Vogel, N.Y. Times Mag.. 15 Apr. 1984 |
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