| 词组 | jejune |
| 释义 | jejune Todd & Hancock 1986 call attention to a curious fact about jejune; derived from a Latin word originally meaning "fasting, hungry," it is usually used figuratively for what is devoid of substance or nutriment for the mind—uninteresting, insipid, or trite stuff. But it has also become associated with an unoriginality that bespeaks immaturity, and so it is used in senses approximating "puerile, juvenile, naive." Todd & Hancock suggest that this semantic "slide," as they put it, may be due to contamination from French jeune "young." Ben Ray Redman had made the same suggestion in the Saturday Review, 2 Mar. 1957. The great difficulty with this word is the ambiguity of many of its uses. Look at this one: • ... unburdens himself of his somewhat naive reflections on the evils of unemployment, and engages in jejune conversations with Foxhall Edwards, his editor, which sound suspiciously like the bull sessions of a college sophomore —Leo Gurko, The Angry Decade, 1947 This example seems to suggest immaturity, but may or may not have been so intended. The mainstream of current use runs in this channel: • It was a gasbag of a speech, soft, loose, jejune, thin gruel for a man who has been at the center of events for more than two decades Is this all he has to say? —Ward Just, New England Monthly, October 1984 But on the outer edges the word has eddies and bywa-ters that are hard to chart. Take this sample: • We pass in the world for sects and schools, for erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes —Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Spiritual Laws," 1841 • If I were Harvard University, or the General Motors Corporation, I would buy and remove The Anchor ... to somewhere in the States; to show the young and jejune what a pub should look like —Christopher Morley, in A Century of the Essay, ed. David Daiches, 1951 • ... he had reached his majority before it ever occurred to him that a white woman might make quite as agreeable a mistress as the octaroons of his jejune fancy —H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920 • ... there is so little other decent fiction around to tickle a jejune man's fantasies —George Stade, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 12 Aug. 1984 • It was just twenty years ago that the Museum of Modern Art held its first jejune exhibition of modern architecture —Lewis Mumford, New Yorker, 11 Oct. 1952 Edmund Wilson, in The Bit Between My Teeth (1965), comments without etymologizing on the use of jejune in the sense "callow." Wilson was familiar with this use, for in 1922 he received this in a letter: • I changed the meaning of jejune eight or ten years ago. That is to say, I added a new special meaning, to wit, that of youthful feebleness —H. L. Mencken, letter, 17 May 1922 If you look back at the Emerson quotation, you may feel that Mencken was perhaps taking a bit more credit for invention than he deserved. Nevertheless, jejune seems to be capable of breaking out in any of several directions. It will be interesting to watch it and see where it goes. |
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