| 词组 | undue, unduly |
| 释义 | undue, unduly The meaning of undue is somewhat variable. At times it means simply "not called for; not necessary or appropriate": • ... show undue panic at the thought —Norman Mailer, Harper's, March 1971 • ... has placed an undue hardship on students —Lee Maxwell, Junior College Jour., November 1970 More often, however, its meaning is closer to "inappropriately excessive or immoderate": • ... writes with almost undue ease and dash —New Yorker, 20 Nov. 1971 • ... to take undue profits out of war —Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech to Congress, 1944, in Nothing to Fear, ed. B. D. Zevin, 1946 • ... the danger of undue emphasis on the Soviet or Communist angle —Rodger Swearingen, Current History, July 1952 Sometimes, however, the notion of inappropriateness is almost entirely lost, so that undue serves essentially as a synonym of excessive or great: • ... the problem of undue population growth in the developing world —Bernard Berelson, Science, 7 Feb. 1969 This same variation in meaning is apparent in the adverb unduly, which is sometimes used to mean "excessively" or "extremely": • In amyloid disease the kidney is unduly firm —Special Pathology and Therapeutics of the Diseases of Domestic Animals, ed. J. Russell Grieg et al., 5th ed., 1949 • ... it was unduly irritating to have to wait —Norman Mailer, Harper's, November 1968 Because of these variations in meaning, undue and unduly have occasionally appeared in contexts where they might seem to be redundant: • ... said that there was no reason for undue alarm — Farmer's Weekly (South Africa), 18 Nov. 1953 • ... we have no reason to be unduly apprehensive — James B. Conant, Atlantic, May 1946 Many critics regard such usage as tantamount to saying "there was no reason for alarm for which there was no reason." What these two sentences actually mean, of course, is that there was no reason for great alarm or for inappropriately excessive alarm, and that we have no reason to be excessively apprehensive. The critics either fail to recognize the meanings of undue and unduly in such contexts, or they believe that it is incorrect to use undue and unduly with these meanings. In any case, as an intelligent writer you should be aware that such usage is liable to be criticized. You may then, according to your disposition, cither avoid the usage or disregard the criticism, on the perfectly legitimate grounds that the criticized senses are well established. |
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