| 词组 | kith and kin |
| 释义 | kith and kin This alliterative phrase has been cited as a cliché by several commentators, beginning with Evans 1957. As clichés go, it is not an especially popular one; we have collected only a few examples of its use during the past several decades. The commentators like to point out that kith means—or formerly meant—"fellow countrymen," so that kith and kin should not, in their view, be taken as referring only to kinsfolk, but to countrymen or acquaintances and kinsfolk. (Similar reasoning could be used to argue that kith should not be understood as meaning "countrymen," since in an even older sense it meant "country," and the OED shows that the original meaning of kith and kin was actually "country and kinsfolk.") What our evidence shows is that kith and kin is variously used and is variously understood in current English. More often than not, it does seem to imply nothing more than "kinsfolk" and is thus open to a charge of redundancy, but its exact meaning is often hard to pin down. Clearly some writers do apply it to friends as well as to relatives: • ... began to interview Sedgwick kith and kin. She talked with friends from Edie's years in Cambridge —Geoffrey Wolff, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 4 July 1982 • ... a great network of kith and kin spread around the globe, among them artists as well as anthropologists, poets as well as psychoanalysts —Marshall Sahlins, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 26 Aug. 1984 |
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