| 词组 | break |
| 释义 | break 1. Copperud 1970, 1980 says that newspaper stylists used to object to "Mrs. Jones broke her arm" unless it was meant that she broke the arm on purpose. Copperud suggests that the stylists are wrong and that the idiom is standard. We do not know what stylists objected to, but the usage itself is entirely standard. • ... she had broken her left foot in a fall —Current Biography, November 1965 2. The usual principal parts of break are broke for the past and broken for the past participle. The variant past participle broke, the OED tells us, was formed from broken in the 14th century and was in widespread use in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the 19th century its use was receding, but the OED notes that it was still used in poetry—by Tennyson, for instance—for metrical purposes. McKnight 1928 points out that Jane Austen in Mansfield Park (1814) put broke in the mouths of her upper-class Bertrams and their friends like Miss Crawford: • If your Miss Bertrams do not like to have their hearts broke But the middle-class Mrs. Norris uses broken: • ... a poor, helpless, forlorn widow, unfit for anything, my spirits quite broken down This presumably illustrates the fact that older forms, forms going out of fashion in the use of the middle classes, often persist longer in the upper and lower classes. Jane Austen herself used broke: • ... the Maypole bearing the weathercock was broke in two —letter, 8 Nov. 1800 The Dictionary of American Regional English reports that the past participle broke is found chiefly in the speech of less educated Americans. It may also be found in the informal use of others: • ... turnip green potliquor with cornbread broke up in it —Flannery O'Connor, letter, fall 1952 It is also the current past participle among those who train horses: • If you do a good job of driving a colt, you can have him broke well enough so that —Oscar Crigler, quoted in Western Horseman, May 1980 • ... where he had been broke as a yearling —Mary Fleming, Western Horseman, October 1981 • Both colts were broke to drive singly —Morgan Horse, April 1983 This usage has been standard in the horse-training business for many years (citations in the Dictionary of American English go back to 1833). A correspondent in 1937 made this point: "A broken horse, they say, is infirm, weak, aged; a broke horse, tamed and disciplined." In view of this distinction, it is easy to understand the preference for broke. |
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