| 词组 | thru |
| 释义 | thru A high-school English teacher wrote to us not long ago about the spelling thru, which she had apparently met with in a school memorandum and which she found in some way offensive. She wanted to know our reason for treating thru as an unstigmatized variant of through in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Thru has received only a little attention from usage writers (Watt 1967 calls it unacceptable in formal writing and Janis 1984 thinks it nonstandard but handy at times). The OED shows that it dates back to the 14th century, but our modern use is due primarily to the spelling reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see spelling reform). Thru was on the first list of reformed spellings issued by the American Philological Association in 1876 and on the list issued by the National Education Association in 1898, as well as on the lists published by the Simplified Spelling Board in the early 20th century. It was also one of the reformed spellings used by the Chicago Tribune from 1935 to 1975. In the heyday of the reformed spelling movement thru was widely used in newspapers and magazines: • Experience has shown thru ever re-occurring instances —Catholic School Jour., March 1927 • ... to look at the universe thru their eyes —W. S. Phillips, Three Bovs in the Indian Hills, in Publishers Weekly, 2 Nov. 1918 • ... borrowed thru a public library —Library Jour., 1 Dec. 1925 • ... this stem went thru vegetation —American Botanist, August 1923 • Poisonous tides from the mother's blood swept thru my foetal heart — JAMA, 14 Aug. 1926 • ... pressed on thru the novel —The Bookman, September 1925 • ... young men at college pay their way thru school by playing in amateur dance orchestras —Music Trade News, June 1926 It could even be found now and then in literary surroundings: • They were sick of winters; but they tried To ponder thru the window at the snow—Stanley Burnshaw, "Waiting in Winter," in Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1926, ed. William Stanley Braithwaite, 1926 • They clasp their hands and pray, And the sun shines brightly on them thru the stripped Autumn vines —Amy Lowell, "The Cornucopia of Red and Green Comfits," in Marguerite Ogden Wilkinson, New Voices, new ed., rev., 1921 As the organized interest in spelling reform waned, however, the use of thru in publications also shrank, although in the 1940s it could still be found in such periodicals as Better Homes and Gardens and the New Republic. We have evidence that the NEA was still using thru in their publications as late as 1944, even though they had withdrawn their endorsement of the reformed spelling movement in 1921. Moreover, our evidence shows that thru is still in use, primarily in technical journals, and in places like catalogs and programs where compactness is a virtue. We have no recent evidence of its use in literature, and very little evidence of its use in any kind of book. Thru is showing some signs of vitality in combination: we are beginning to find examples like feedthru and thruput (thruway, of course, is well-established). It undoubtedly continues to flourish as a spelling of convenience in letters and notes: • After we got thru our conversation —Harry S. Truman, appointment sheet, 19 May 1945 • ... leaves ... with the sun coming thru them —Randall Jarrell, letter, 6 May 1952 Thru is a simplified form that did not fight its way into respectable usage from below, like alright, but was imposed from above by educators, reformers, and philologists. It has never been less than standard, but it remains a distant second choice in print. In the Brown University million-word corpus, which is composed of edited English texts published in 1961, there are 969 examples of through to just 10 of thru (Kucera & Francis 1967). It is an available spelling, but not many writers avail themselves of it when they are writing for publication. See also tho. |
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