| 词组 | kind of, sort of |
| 释义 | kind of, sort of These phrases slid imperceptibly into adverbial function from their various uses sometime around the end of the 18th century. They began to draw unfavorable notice from the commentators a little more than a century later. Vizetelly 1906 and Bierce 1909 opened fire on kind of; MacCracken & Sandison 1917 added sort of. They received mention by all of the 1920s commentators in our collection. Jensen 1935 sums up the majority opinion: "These are adjectival phrases and should never be used adverbially." And why is that? Vizetelly gave his reasons for kind of. He said it was an American provincialism that had no literary authorization. The OED has examples from English, Irish, and Scots sources (Dickens among them). The Dictionary of American English has earlier evidence, and it is American, but clearly this is not an American provincialism. Vizetelly may have been on sounder grounds in denying kind of 'any status in literature. The earliest example is from a broadside of some sort and may be below literary notice. In 1804 it was used in a poem by Thomas G. Fessenden, who is noted here and there in H. L. Mencken's The American Language and its second supplement as a person not averse to publishing comments on the correctness or incorrectness of American provincialisms. Perhaps Vizetelly was being a literary critic in this instance. But he might have spotted kind of 'in these two American authors, if he had looked: • ... kind of stood by me —Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, 1876 • And so on—fourteen verses. It was kind of poor — Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883 • ... didn't have the family brains, and he was kind of soft-hearted —Winston Churchill, The Crisis, 1901 Kind of and sort of (for which the earliest evidence is British) are simply speech forms—idioms commonly used in ordinary speech. Krapp 1927 called them "colloquial," which was his way of saying the same thing. Krapp's word is the one most frequently repeated in recent handbooks, but one tends to suspect that recent commentators are unfamiliar with Krapp's sense of the word. McMahan & Day 1980, for instance, use the label colloquial but follow it up with this remark: "The phrases can be used in standard English, but not as adverbs." But colloquial and nonstandard are not synonymous; kind of and sort of are regularly used in standard English all the time. The thing you must remember is that they are primarily spoken idioms, and thus are most at home in speech, fictional speech, and prose written in a light or familiar style. Here is a generous sample of typical instances: • ... it made me feel kind of shaky for a while — Archibald MacLeish, letter, 12 Aug. 1910 • I kind of thought it was —Booth Tarkington, Pen-rod, 1914 • "... I could stand it if we didn't go back to the lovin' • wives, ... but just kind of stayed in Monarch "—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922 • And I kind of want to make her Moyra —Henry James, "Notes for The Ivory Tower," 1917 • "... You see, they're tennis shoes, and I'm sort of helpless without them " —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925 • We've been having practice raids here, and I dash around the roads at night blowing a horn and feeling kind of silly —E. B. White, letter, 21 May 1942 • Funny as hell, isn't it? Kind of like a tenderfoot Boy Scout trying to clean up the Paris red-light district — Bill Mauldin, N. Y. Herald Tribune Book Rev., 7 July 1946 • He wasn't even a politician, and it's kind of hard to explain why he stayed in politics —James Thurber, New Yorker, 9 June 1951 • ... and it's kind of true —Randall Jarrell, letter, 24 Sept. 1951 • ... they all sort of work together —Lord Snowden, quoted in Australian Women's Weekly, 30 Apr. 1975 • The book kind of dribbles to a close —Tim Bowden, Nation Rev. (Melbourne), 8 May 1975 • ... I kind of liked him too —And More by Andy Rooney, 1982 • ... then coming up with insights, sort of, to match the latter —Joan Barthel, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 27 May 1984 • Jim believed that God sort of generally watched over the world —Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days, 1985 • ... they were to be transferred in amounts sort of as drawn —Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, quoted in The Tower Commission Report, 1987 |
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