| 词组 | guts |
| 释义 | guts The sense of guts meaning "courage" has been around for quite some time now: the OED Supplement gives the first use as occurring in 1893. We have little evidence for its use until after 1915. • We've got to work up our end ... and fall to and bring the English out. It's the one race in this world that's got the guts —Walter H. Page, letter, 22 June 1916 Although Walter H. Page seems to have felt nothing was particularly coarse about the word, guts could and did provoke some strong reactions: • Since the publication of my dialogue on Modern Disillusion a little while ago I have received a number of protests—some unfortunately anonymous— against my use of the word "guts" to signify mental courage. One correspondent has sent me a clipping from a Western magazine called All's Well in which the writer says: "When I came upon it [guts] in a high-class magazine I was not only nauseated but astonished that the editor would allow it." —Lewis Mumford, letter to the editor, The Nation, 11 Feb. 1925 Its use makes the commentators a little nervous even today. Evans 1957 found it "coarse but effective"; Copperud 1970, 1980 thinks the word is always used with the deliberate intent to shock or to sound rough-hewn; Flesch 1983 quotes a use by William Safire and seems a little surprised that his editors let him get away with it; both Flesch and Shaw 1975, 1987 feel that it is slang. As you read through the following examples, you will see that critical opinion has not caught up to actual use yet. However, the word is indeed plain and forthright, and if you are not prepared to be plain and forthright (or feel your audience is not prepared to have you so), you might want to choose an alternative such as courage, mettle, pluck, spirit, resolution—or even that old periphrastic warhorse, intestinal fortitude. • ... I'm trying to prove to myself right now that I've got the guts to stick it out here —Hearst's Mag., March 1917 •... Just tell them straight from the shoulder ... here we intend to stay until some one kicks us out Put all the guts into it that you can!" —O.E. Rölvaag, Giants In the Earth, 1927 • Finally, he has the guts to grab the job, if grabbing is necessary —John Gunther, Inside Europe, rev. ed., 1937 • The point is that my "social sympathies" should have made me a communist, and would have done so if I had only had the guts —Yale Rev., Summer 1939 • But they should be songs with what has been called "the real intestines"—not to use the plain word guts —Saturday Rev., 25 Apr. 1942 • ... what had taken place ... apparently involved just guts, the revolt of a man against the pure foot-lessness which had held him in bondage —William Styron, Lie Down In Darkness, 1951 • These facts speak eloquently of the guts and stamina of these two men —Sir John Hunt & Sir Edmund Hillary, GeographicalJour., December 1953 • There was no one in the house who had guts enough to say that Some Came Running was a washerwoman at 1,200 pages, and could be fair at 400 — Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959 • ... Charlotte shows some guts in telling the Matron how to run her hospital —Times Literary Supp., 19 May 1966 • ... those who might have challenged him didn't have the guts to do it —Merle Miller, TV. Y. Times Book Rev., 23 Nov. 1975 • ... but people so much want a poet with guts that they cling to him like a port in a storm —Virginia Woolf, letter, 1930 (in Times Literary Supp., 28 May 1982) • Otherwise, the members would raise hell, and it would look as if the Democrats didn't have any guts —Tip O'Neill with William Novak, Man of the House, 1987 |
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