| 词组 | imaginary, imaginative |
| 释义 | imaginary, imaginative Shaw 1975, 1987, Phythian 1979, and Copperud 1970, 1980 all differentiate between imaginary and imaginative, agreeing roughly that the first means "existing in the imagination, not real" and the second "characterized by or showing use of the imagination." They do so on obvious grounds. It is hard to imagine the words interchanged in examples like these: • Many of the ailments were imaginary —Joyce Carol Oates, Harper's, August 1971 • ... threatening her with some very imaginative mutilations —Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977 • He had liked each tree—one for climbing, another to play beneath with tiny, imaginary people —Robert Canzoneri, McCall's, March 1971 • ... an imaginative and unassuming ... architectural genius —P. W. Stone, Catholic Digest, December 1968 But the words can be much closer in meaning: • His canvases, chiefly imaginary, somber landscapes —Current Biography, June 1965 • ... romantic in the sense that they deal with an imaginative realm to which men and women like to resort to escape the drabness of their daily routine — Morris R. Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal, 1946 • ... works that create through language an essentially imaginative environment for the hero —Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere, 1946 In such use, relating to art and literature, imaginative is more common, and it stresses what is produced by the imagination as distinct from what merely exists in the imagination, for which imaginary is the usual word. • The Alderman's son is Shakespeare, and the book is an imaginative reconstruction of his early life —M. R. Ridley, London Calling, 29 Apr. 1954 • ... works of imaginative literature —Walter Arnold, Saturday Rev., 7 July 1979 |
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