| 词组 | underprivileged |
| 释义 | underprivileged This word was called "illiterate" by Lord Conesford, an English baron with strong opinions: • A privilege is a special advantage which one person has over another.... An underprivileged person must mean a person who has not enough privilege— a person, that is to say, who has not enough advantage over his neighbor. To pretend that you are in favor of equality before the law and then to use a word which complains that there is not enough inequality seems to me to exceed the stupidity limit —Lord Conesford, Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1957 Conesford regarded underprivileged as an example of "American pretentious illiteracy." Perhaps he discussed the matter with Sir Ernest Gowers. In Fowler 1965 Gowers used the same reasoning as Conesford to criticize underprivileged. However impressively stated, that reasoning is specious. It can just as easily be argued that underprivileged is a perfectly logical word. The citizens of a country have fundamental rights and privileges by virtue of their citizenship. A citizen who, because of social or economic conditions, is denied certain of those rights and privileges can therefore logically be called an "underprivileged" person. In any case, a word is not necessarily equal to the sum of its parts. The facts about underprivileged are these: its first recorded use was in an 1896 edition of the Princetonian; evidence of its more widespread use, as in newspapers, dates from the mid-1920s; by the 1950s it had become a common word, and it continues to be one today, recognized as standard in both American and British dictionaries. Some people undoubtedly dislike it, regarding it as a euphemism for poor. It often implies more than simple poverty, however, and sometimes poverty does not enter into it at all: • ... protest against suffering by a special underprivileged group—women —Natalie Shainess, M.D., Psychology Today, May 1970 • If you are one of the millions of Smiths, Thompsons, or Williamses, you are in the underprivileged part of the alphabet —John E. Gibson, Catholic Digest, December 1968 |
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