| 词组 | inchoate |
| 释义 | inchoate A number of British commentators, beginning with Ivor Brown 1945 and running through Gowers in Fowler 1965, Howard 1977, and Bryson 1984, complain about the extension of meaning of inchoate from "incipient, immature, or just beginning" (Howard's définitions) to "amorphous, incoherent, or disorganized" (Howard again). A couple of American commentators, Flesch 1964 and Shaw 1987, agree. But the extended use is natural and probably inevitable: what is just begun is also unfinished, incomplete, and often also disorganized or incoherent. There is no need to bring forward a putative confusion with chaotic to explain the development. And unfortunately for the complainers, the extension of meaning was already three decades old or more when Brown noticed it. • ... all the world of men outside seemed inchoate, purposeless, like the swarming, slimy, minute life in stagnant water —Mary Webb, The Golden Arrow, 1916 • ... had to seek the help of their conquered subjects, or of more vigorous foreigners, to administer their ill-knit and inchoate empires —T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1935 • Sometimes her sweltering and inchoate fury was so great that she threw him on the floor and stamped on him —Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, 1929 • The heart of the crowd is undoubtedly a thing of vague, inchoate yearnings to be touched —John Livingston Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry, 1919 It is now one of the words regularly used by reviewers: • ... it threatens to dominate their narratives, as something inchoate, unchannelled, mysterious — John Updike, New Yorker, 10 Apr. 1971 • ... the pieces seem almost inchoate: ideas struggling to be realized, works waiting to be born —Lisa Hammel, N.Y. Times, 9 Mar. 1976 • ... about 132 pages of inchoate material in this new collection —Joyce Carol Oates, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 1 Apr. 1979 It also has considerable use in other kinds of writing: • In the colleges ... it [composition] falls characteristically into the least experienced hands, where it is pawed and plied into a thousand inchoate shapes — Walker Gibson, in The Hues of English, 1969 • ... his unique set of blocks, inhibitions, and inchoate anxieties —Norman Mailer, Harper's, March 1971 • ... can help us to examine the often inchoate assumptions underlying our relationships —Susan Edmiston, New York, 27 Dec. 1971 American dictionaries and at least one British one have already acknowledged this spread of meaning. |
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