| 词组 | ignoramus |
| 释义 | ignoramus Fowler 1926 and Evans 1957 insist that the only plural for ignoramus is ignoramuses, not ignor-ami. Fowler justifies his assertion on the grounds that it is derived from a Latin verb and not from a noun. Well, in legal language it is. But the common use comes from a character in a play (Ignoramus, 1615, by George Rug-gle) whose name came from the legal term. And one suspects that Fowler and Evans would not have protested ignorami if it had not been used. It has, but it has not made the dictionary yet. Ignorami began to turn up in our files in the 1920s. It was perhaps a facetious formation, but one can hardly tell from examples like these: • ... free of the cheap and hokum stagework of those coxcombish ignorami who call themselves actors — Plain Talk, March 1928 • ... the gawks and ignorami who circulated around the schoolhouse back in Hickory Creek —Literary Digest, 5 May 1923 We have about half a dozen examples from the 1920s, but nothing after that until the mid 1960s: • And you can't think how it annoys me to see the New Ignorami of criticism refer to him merely as Twain, as if that were his real name —Katherine Anne Porter, N. Y. Herald Tribune Book Week, 26 Dec. 1965 • Such missteps, while often howlingly funny to ignorami like us, are deadly serious concerns to psychologists and linguists —Roger Rosenblatt, in The Bedford Reader, ed. X. J. Kennedy & Dorothy M. Kennedy, 1985 • These ignorami should never have been invited to the party —Michael I. Miller, American Speech, Summer 1984 If the revival continues, ignorami is bound to be recorded in the dictionaries. Ignoramuses is the usual plural, however. |
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