| 词组 | terrible, terribly |
| 释义 | terrible, terribly Much of the terror has gone out of these words. The oldest sense of terrible, "causing terror or dread; terrifying," is now relatively rare: • ... the main cat qualities he had were his laziness and his short, terrible speed —Ernest Hemingway, "African Journal," 1956 More commonly, terrible implies not so much terror as great distress or suffering: • ... during those five terrible days of war —New Yorker, 17 June 1967 • ... came to me on that terrible day in 1963 —Mrs. Medgar Evers, Ladies' Home Jour., September 1971 It also commonly means "extremely severe": • ... corporations have overcome these terrible handicaps —Arnold J. Toynbee, in Arnold J. Toynbee et al., "Will Businessmen Unite the World?" 1971 These uses of terrible are uncontroversial. But its frequent use in the sense "extremely bad" is often cited as a colloquialism, or at least as something to be avoided in formal writing. This sense has long been established in ordinary speech, and our evidence shows that its occurrence in ordinary writing is also now common: • ... though the book is hard to classify, it is not hard to evaluate. It is terrible —Dwight Macdonald, New Yorker, 22 May 1954 • Some were bad, some were good, and some were terrible —Robert M. Coates, New Yorker, 1 Jan. 1956 • ... the terrible thing about a television set is that you can have no interaction with it —S. I. Hayakawa, ETC, June 1968 • The boasting about it is terrible —Russell Baker, N.Y. Times Mag., 19 Aug. 1973 • As could easily have been predicted, the song is terrible —Newman 1974 The contexts in which this sense of terrible occurs could not be called formal, but neither are they remarkably informal. They have the conversational tone that is characteristic of much modern writing. The adverb terribly is an issue primarily because of its use as an intensive equivalent to very or extremely. Such usage dates back to the 19th century. The critics feel, again, that the intensive terribly is inappropriate in formal writing, and the evidence shows, again, that it occurs commonly in ordinary discursive prose, though not in the more solemn kinds of writing: • But Mrs. Rigg is terribly nice, and I was glad to be there —E. B. White, letter, 4 Feb. 1942 • ... a rather good old-fashioned provincial newspaper, dignified but terribly stodgy —W. H. Auden, New Yorker, 12 July 1952 • ... extremely bright children who have become terribly restless —Irving Howe, Harper's, February 1971 • They were, in the main, extremely talented, terribly hard workers —John Chancellor, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 27 May 1984 See also awful, awfully. |
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