| 词组 | lawman |
| 释义 | lawman Sheriffs in the old West were not actually called lawmen, but that is what we call them now. The word lawman appears to have been first adopted by the writers of Westerns in the 1940s: • ... Mariposa took Rio for a lawman A thrill-packed Western yarn —Huntting's Monthly List, February 1944 • The burly lawman took the youth by the arm —Burt Arthur, The Buckaroo, 1947 By the 1950s, lawman had gained enough currency from its use in popular books and movies that journalists began applying it more widely as a general term for a law-enforcement officer: • ... shot and killed three police officers ... and stood off some 30 other lawmen in a 1/4-hour gunbattle — Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican, 29 May 1955 The use of lawmen in the N. Y. Times in 1958 caught the critical eye of Theodore Bernstein, who evidently was no fan of Westerns: • What on earth are "lawmen" and what is the need for such a coinage? —Winners & Sinners, 5 Feb. 1958 Bernstein 1965 repeated this criticism, and it apparently has had some influence among other journalists; Harper 1975, 1985 notes that the Associated Press stylebook treats lawman as a word to be shunned. Copperud 1970, 1980, however, accepts it as a standard word, as do the several dictionaries that now enter it (including Webster's Third and Random House 1987). Its association with the old West remains strong enough to make it most appropriate for describing a law-enforcement officer who has—or is seen as having—some of the qualities of a gun-toting sheriff: • That May day in 1936 I made Hoover's reputation as a fearless lawman —Alvin Karpis, quoted in Los Angeles Times Book Rev., 23 May 1971 |
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