| 词组 | guess |
| 释义 | guess Look at the use of guess in these two examples. • "Well, I don't expect to marry. I don't know as I do, at my time of life," responded the spinster. "I rather guess my day for chances is gone by." —Francis Lee Pratt, "Captain Ben's Choice," in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, 1888 • "I guess I'll use lemon instead of vinegar," she said —And More by Andy Rooney, 1982 Such uses of I guess were long accounted Americanisms and have long been looked down on by some of our British cousins (Phythian 1979 still thinks the expression "worth resisting"). American defenders from James Russell Lowell (Introduction to the Bigelow Papers, 2d series, 1867) to H. L. Mencken (The American Language, 3d edition, 1923) to Harper 1975, 1985 have shown that the expression is an old one in English that came over to this country straight from the language of Shakespeare's time. Howard 1977 agrees: "I guess, in the sense I am pretty sure, was good English before it became good American." Howard finds it coming back into British use from American. • Some American commentators—Lurie 1927, Jensen 1935, Guth 1985, Macmillan 1982, for instance—have been diffident about it. American uncertainty goes back at least to Joseph Hervey Hull's Grammar of 1829, but American English is nothing to be ashamed of. We are not advising you to use I guess in your starchiest formal discourse, and we doubt that you would be inclined to. In contexts like those shown above, however, it is perfectly acceptable. |
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