| 词组 | tend |
| 释义 | tend The use of tend as an intransitive verb meaning "to pay attention; attend" is standard in American English: • We should tend to our business—which is to teach the young —Milton Friedman, reprinted column, 1969 • He suggested that Russia and the United States might work out their problems separately and the United Nations could tend to what was left — Eugene J. McCarthy, Center Mag., March/April 1971 • ... tends to the worldwide oil empire his late father built up —Susan Sheehan, McCall's, October 1971 • ... the administrations have tended to the more general matters of institutional survival —George W. Bonham, Change, April 1972 This sense of tend is extremely old, dating back to the 14th century. It originated as a short form of attend, as did the transitive tend of "tend the fire" and "tend the sick." The intransitive tend appears to have fallen out of written use in the 1600s, but it survived in spoken dialect thereafter and has experienced an impressive revival in writing during the past 100 years. Evidence from the late 19th and early 20th centuries shows it being used by such authors as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Margaret Mitchell in written representations of southern U.S. speech. It also occasionally occurred in ordinary, straightforward writing, where it was noted and criticized by Fowler 1926. Recent decades have seen a gradual increase in its respectability, and it now occurs regularly in standard contexts. The usual advice of current usage commentators is that it should be strictly limited to informal writing. That advice does not appear to be widely followed. |
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