| 词组 | them |
| 释义 | them 1. See it's me; they, their, them; 2.Demonstrative pronoun. • A century ago New York Mayor "Boss" Tweed, smarting from Thomas Nast's cartoons, exclaimed, "I don't care what they print about me, but stop them damn cartoons!" —Peter Bates, Bostonia Mag., March 1984 Boss Tweed's them is a demonstrative pronoun with a mysterious history. In its modern form, it is attested only since the end of the 16th century. But many observers have been tantalized by the possibility that modern English them is a survival of Old English dœm (thœm), the masculine and neuter dative of the definite article. The theory is an attractive one, but it has one serious defect—the missing Middle English link. All examples of them found in Middle English so far are of the personal pronoun, not the demonstrative. In Middle English the Old English dative seems to have weakened and the final -m become -n or simply disappeared. If there was a demonstrative them that survived in Middle English, it has not been discovered yet. So our attractive theory must be set aside for the present. (For another word with a missing Middle English link, see the discussion of snuck at sneak, snuck.) From the early examples in the OED and in Jespersen 1909-49 (vol. 2), it would appear that demonstrative them enjoyed about a century of unnoticed use. Many of its early occurrences were in works of piety, of which John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1660) is probably the closest approach to literature. There seem to have been no truly literary uses of the word until the 19th century, when it began to occur in fictitious speech. The demonstrative them seems to have first attracted commentary at about the beginning of the 19th century (it was criticized in Lindley Murray's English Grammar at that time, although we do not know for certain in which edition the criticism first appeared). H. L. Mencken in The American Language, Supplement II (1948), mentions its being denounced as a barbarism by the Reverend Adiel Sherwood, who included a glossary in his 1827 "Gazetteer of the State of Georgia." James C. Stalker in Greenbaum 1985 cites Thomas Harvey's Practical Grammar of the English Language (1868) as warning against it. It was mentioned in Bache 1869, and from that point on it has come in for regular criticism in schoolbooks. Perhaps because of the efforts of two centuries worth of schoolmasters, the demonstrative them is now largely restricted to the speech of the uneducated and to the familiar speech of others. It has been in use for about four centuries, and has still not reached respectability. In writing, then, you can expect to find it in the same places you would find words of similar status: in reported speech, in fictitious speech (especially of little-educated characters), and, especially in the 20th century, in the familiar usage of educated people when they are being humorous. Here are some of our examples: • ... and then father had bid him bring up them two bits of board, for he could not nohow do without them —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814 • I butts in then and said Don't worry, Cobb. You won't have to run because we have got a catcher who can hold them third strikes —Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al, 1916 • ... he bars the doctors. He'd die roarin' before he'd let them boys put a finger on him —Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien), The Best of Myles, 1968 • Can I afford to let Etta clean up those dishes in the sink and get them biscuits baked...?—Robert Bench-ley, The Benchley Round Up, 1954 • She never really had liked them big droopy things — Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, 1985 • You mustn't fake articles any more. Not even in details. Them's orders —Robert Frost, letter, 18 Mar. 1913 • I aim to read Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus and any other of them boys that I can think of —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 7 Apr. 1956 • You remember Chesterton's slogan—"My mother, drunk or sober!" Well, them's my sentiments toward you, old thing —Alexander Woollcott, letter, 15 Nov. 1920 |
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