| 词组 | bunch |
| 释义 | bunch Whatever it is that seems to be wrong with bunch appears to be a singularly American problem, and one commented upon chiefly by writers of college handbooks. Our evidence shows what seems to be a sharp increase in the use of bunch both as a generalized collective and as a word for a group of people just after the turn of this century. Typical early examples are these: • I'd rather be William S. Devery than a whole bunch of kings —Hudson (N.Y.) Register, 4 Nov. 1902 • ... the trust is a bunch of beef companies put together —Star of Hope, 3 Oct. 1903 • The whole bunch should be at Dixmont, which would be the proper place for them to stop —Automobile Rev., 1 Nov. 1903 • Somehow he did not take with the bunch and one of the crowd walked up to him —N.Y. Sun, 20 Dec. 1903 • Then he finishes his hogs with corn he raises himself, ships the hogs to Sioux City and has another bunch of clean cash —The Farmer and Breeder, 1 Apr. 1903 Uses like these—the word must have been common in speech—ruffled some writers on usage. The earliest we have found is Utter 1916, who objects to the collective use: "it is not heard on the lips of the fastidious." MacCracken & Sandison 1917 objected to the use for a group of people (they condemned crowd at the same time): "unaccepted colloquialisms or slang for group or set." Most of the other early critics take the MacCracken & Sandison tack: Vizetelly in Slips of Speech (1922), F. K. Ball's Constructive English (1923), Lurie 1927, Jensen 1935. Krapp 1927 hits both usages. After World War II the emphasis of the handbooks shifts to the general collective, with the "group of people" sense taking a back seat. Repeating more or less the same strictures are Watt 1967, Evans 1957, Shaw 1970, 1975, Bell & Cohn 1980, Little, Brown 1980, Macmillan 1982, and Janis 1984. Evans 1957 introduced a new strain, calling the use of bunch meaning "lot" (as in, "that's a bunch of baloney") "definitely wrong." Janis 1984 calls it nonstandard. Let's examine some actual examples of the three disputed usages. First, the group of people: • "... there isn't a private school in the state that's got as swell a bunch as we got in Gamma Digamma this year...." —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, 1922 • "... And think of what my bunch will say if I go back home and tell 'em we went to a night club and I couldn't have a cocktail...." —American Mercury, January 1928 The "my bunch, the bunch" use is no longer current. But the word has continued in a less personal use: • ... that high hat bunch which seems to be reading the Saturday Review —Saturday Rev., 11 Apr. 1925 • ... along with some of the radical students they were looked upon as a queer bunch —American Mercury, April 1928 • By that hour, we were usually an overheated, irritable bunch —J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories, 1953 • The new management trims out all the excess expenses ... blaming the low earnings that result on the old bunch —Forbes, 15 May 1967 • They were a tough-looking bunch —Daphne du Maurier, Ladies' Home Jour., September 1971 • ... my colleagues are, for the most part, an eminently lovable bunch —Alan Rich, New York, 10 Jan. 1972 This sense appears to be established as standard, at least in what Perrin & Ebbitt 1972 call general use. The general collective use, which dates back to the 17th century, would seem to be well established: • A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malemute saloon —Robert W. Service, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," 1907 • They raise houses in skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of another ... so that in place of one horizontal street you have bunches of perpendicular ones —George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, 1928 • "... He's a group-manager. Looks after a bunch of clients...." —Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 1933 • The first bunch of twenty-one characters, by Over-bury and others, was added to the second impression of his poem —Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660, 1945 • ... he did correspondence courses in philosophy at a bunch of universities —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of A ugie March, 1953 • ... a little bunch of us drifted away and into an open doorway —E. B. White, New Yorker, 7 Apr. 1956 • ... and of course the familiar bunch of hippies from my own country —Daphne du Maurier, Don't Look Now, 1966 • ... the best-looking bunch of guarantees they had ever been offered —Mollie Panter-Downes, New Yorker, 26 Aug. 1972 • ... a whole bunch of activities that had nothing to do with the intricate business of collecting and distributing accurate secret intelligence —John le Carré, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 14 Oct. 1979 Finally, the use of bunch with a mass noun. As Evans' illustration—"that's a bunch of baloney"—suggests, this sense is well established in speech. It goes all the way back to Dr. Johnson: • I am glad the Ministry is removed. Such a bunch of imbecility never disgraced a country —in Boswell's Life, 1791 (OED) However, it does not appear in print very often. Nonetheless rarity does not make it wrong, or even nonstandard. • Did you ever hear such a bunch of nonsense in your life? —Everybody's, October 1914 • ... he would have a bunch of money —Upton Sinclair, The Goslings, 1924 • In spite of the prickly bunch of dissent disconcertingly handed to Mr. Wilson —Mollie Panter-Downes, New Yorker, 11 Feb. 1967 • ... and listen to a bunch of sentimental drivel — Paul Kresh, Stereo Rev., July 1971 On the basis of this and much similar evidence, we think that the continued objection to these uses of bunch is nothing more than a tradition in usage commentary dating back to before the 1920s. The hair-splitting reasoning that finds "a bunch of roses" and "a bunch of keys" formal but "a bunch of individualists" and "a bunch of numbers" and "a bunch of nonsense" informal or colloquial or slang is purely factitious. You can observe it if you wish, but there is no reason to do so beyond your own preference. |
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