| 词组 | hark back, harken back, hearken back |
| 释义 | hark back, harken back, hearken back To understand the problem here, we have to spend a moment on hark, harken, and hearken. These words are related, and all have the basic sense "to listen, listen carefully," Harken is just a spelling variant of hearken; the OED shows harken to have been used earlier, but hearken came to predominate. Harken was probably given some impetus in American use by its having been put forward as a reformed spelling—the Chicago Tribune adopted it in 1934—and most of our 20th-century evidence for it is American. Both harken and hearken are still used in their basic meaning. Hark, however, is now rare in its sense of "listen." From its use as a cry in hunting, it had developed various uses for actions in hunting; in these it was usually accompanied by an adverb such as away, on, forward, or back. Hark back was a 19th-century formation which quickly acquired a figurative meaning "to turn back to an earlier topic or circumstance." This has become an established use and is the most frequent employment of hark, although it can still be found with forward, after, and to. In the 20th century hark back began to influence hearken and harken. Our earliest evidence is from 1933: • And so on, until a fairly complete image of the room has been constructed to which one's mind can at any moment hearken back —Ira Victor Morris, Covering Two Years, 1933 • ... they hearken back to the good old days of a century ago —Bernard Berelson, Saturday Rev., 12 May 1951 • This ancestral harkening back to Mark Twain — John Henry Raleigh, New Republic, 8 Feb. 1954 • There are purists, of course, who hearken back to pre-lift days —William Gilman, N. Y. Times, 16 Jan. 1955 • ... the recipes hearken back to yesteryear —Horace Sutton, Saturday Rev., 20 Mar. 1971 • ... tales ... harken back to an earlier time —George Carey, Johns Hopkins Mag., January 1976 • The quadrangles of countless universities and museums hearken back to this monastic original — Michael Olmert, Smithsonian, June 1980 • Many illustrators ... continue to harken back to the pseudomedievalism of Randolph Caldecott —John Seelye, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 11 Nov. 1984 It appears from our most recent evidence that the spelling harken is beginning to prevail in this use in American English. In the 1980s it has begun to differentiate further from hearken; it has developed a sense meaning "hark back" without back: • ... an unflawed specimen that harkens to the days of Sherlock Holmes —Carleton Jones, Maryland Mag., Spring 1982 • The biographies and legends harken to those his grandfather told him —Samuel G. Freedman, N. Y. Times Mag., 23 Oct. 1983 • One very dusty bottle in the cellars... harkens to the days of Napoleon —Anne Marshall Zwack, Gourmet, September 1985 Three commentators—Theodore Bernstein in a Winners & Sinners from about 1970, Copperud 1980, and Reader's Digest 1983—have noticed the h(e)arken back construction. They think it must be a mistake. But it is already fairly well established in general writing and is continuing to gain ground. If the present trend continues, harken, with or without back, may come to be regularly used to mean "hark back" in American English. We have no evidence that hearken back is establishing itself in British use, though it has occasional use in the U.S. At the present time, however, neither hearken back nor harken back appears to be replacing hark back, which continues in frequent use, both British and American. |
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