| 词组 | intensive, intense |
| 释义 | intensive, intense The controversy over these two words was started by Fowler 1926. His complaint was that intensive was replacing intense in a sense meaning approximately "highly concentrated." He laid the blame for this change on two phrases that apparently began to appear frequently around the time of World War I— intensive farming (this sense of intensive now has become more specialized and has a separate definition) and intensive bombardment. He thus charged other use of this intensive with being a popularized technicality and plumped for intense instead. The vehemence of Fowler's remarks has impressed later usage writers, and we have a number of subsequent treatments of the two words as a result. Nickles 1974 and Bryson 1982 more or less repeat Fowler. Evans 1957 discusses Fowler's treatment at greater length and in an enlightened fashion. Most commentators—Shaw 1975, 1987, Chambers 1985, Heritage 1982—simply differentiate the two words, using examples of each in which the words would not be interchanged. Flesch 1964 adds the view that intensive is overused. What Fowler seems to have noticed was a change in usage in progress. The OED shows that the two earliest senses of intensive are synonymous with two senses of intense, "very strong or acute" and "highly concentrated." The OED marked both these senses of intensive obsolete because their evidence ended with the 17th century. The first of these is indeed obsolete: Robert Burton wrote intensive pleasure but nowadays only intense is used in such a context. The second sense, if indeed it was obsolete, has been revived in the 20th century, and in the second half of the 20th century it has all but replaced intense in the "highly concentrated" sense. In the 20th century the words have tended to differentiate along different lines from those Fowler was defending. Intense has tended to become limited to describing some inherent characteristic: • ... in the intense sunlight —Nancy Milford, Harper's, January 1969 • But tonight... the excitement was more intense — James Jones, Harper's, February 1971 • ... there was intense concern for his health —Norman Cousins, Saturday Rev., 30 Oct. 1971 • ... requiring intense concentration —Stanley Marcus, Minding the Store, 1974 • ... the intense dislike she arouses —Alfred Kazin, Harper's, August 1971 Intensive would never be used in those contexts. Intensive tends to connote something that is applied from outside: • ... gave them six years of intensive training for leadership —William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1960 • ... Grissom and Glenn underwent intensive preparation for the next space flight —Current Biography, June 1965 • ... nine days of intensive screenings, panel sessions, and lectures —Arthur Knight, Saturday Rev., 12 Feb. 1972 • ... the trees, once started, would need no intensive attention —Rexford G. Tugwell, Center Mag., September 1968 • The foreign children in Cologne are taught intensive German for two years —Deborah Churchman, Christian Science Monitor, 1 July 1980 It would appear that the "highly concentrated" sense is generally viewed as externally applied rather than an inherent characteristic and is thus displacing intense in this use. Intense is not dead in this use, but it is dwindling: • ... an intense barrage of anti-personnel gunfire — Current Biography, April 1966 • But some of them, in spite of care and intense treatment, can never fly well enough to defend themselves or hunt —Margery Facklam, "Kay McKeever and a Parliament of Owls," in Chains of Light (8th-grade textbook), ed. Theodore Clymer, 1982 |
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