| 词组 | beside, besides |
| 释义 | beside, besides As a number of commentators remark and all conscientious dictionaries show, there is a certain amount of overlap between these two words. The OED shows that historically there was even more than there is now. It was Edward S. Gould who, in 1856 as he himself tells us, first undertook to distinguish between the two for a benighted and confused world, since the dictionaries of his day did not. His distinction was to restrict beside to use as a preposition; besides was both adverb and preposition, and when a preposition meant "in addition to." He declared beside when meaning "in addition to" to be an error. Gould's distinction has been repeated and repeated (we have it more than thirty times in our files) right down to Einstein 1985. Moreover, in general Gould's distinction is reflective of the trend of modern usage, although it is not exact in all particulars. Modern commentators, while repeating Gould, have tended to further simplify his pronouncements; some try to reduce beside to a single sense and besides to one sense for the preposition and one for the adverb. Consultation of a dictionary will disabuse anyone misled by such oversimplification. Besides is the easier word to deal with. It has the adverbial action all to itself; beside, the older adverb, is archaic. • ... lost her social position, job, and husband, and was broke besides —Sally Quinn, Cosmopolitan, November 1972 As a preposition, besides usually means "except, other than, together with": • There were other irritations, besides the voice — Martha Gellhorn, Atlantic, March 1953 • ... often we know a good deal about them besides the name —W. F. Bolton, A Short History of Literary English, 1967 • You wish you could remember something about Spinoza, besides the fact that he was excommunicated —Jay Mclnerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984 Beside is always approved in prepositional uses like these: • ... a sputtering old Model T ... coughed and died right beside the schoolyard —Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982 • In the ditch beside the road —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925 • But the conception is really nothing, you know, beside the delivery —Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 1975 The only question arises when beside is used in the preposition sense of besides. Gould disliked this use, and most commentators since his time simply avoid it by not mentioning it at all. Although it is not nearly as frequent as besides, it is well attested. It has been in use since the 14th century and appears in the King James version of the Bible in several places. Our modern evidence for this sense of beside is modestly literary: • A hundred incidents beside those here chosen would have served as well —Carl Van Dören, The American Novel, 1940 • Beside the resident members, other members dropped in and out during the day —The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 1953 • Beside being taken into a world of escapist literature a thoughful reader can go somewhat further —John P. Marquand, Book-of-the-Month-Club News, April 1946 • ... his other mythical theme beside the South —Leslie A. Fiedler, New Republic, 23 Aug. 1954 While this use of beside is not wrong, nor rare, nor nonstandard, besides is the word most people use. |
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