| 词组 | burgeon, burgeoning |
| 释义 | burgeon, burgeoning It appears that no one was concerned about the figurative uses of burgeon until the 1960s, when Theodore Bernstein (in Winners & Sinners at least as early as 1964), Flesch 1964, and Follett 1966 discovered it. The recommendation of Flesch is short and to the point: "burgeon is a fancy word that can easily be replaced." And in fact it is a fancy word—you have to learn it, and if you learn it from an older dictionary, as Bernstein and Follett did, you learn that it means "to send forth buds or shoots"—Webster's Second defines it simply as "to bud, sprout." There is a perfectly sound reason for this brief 1934 dictionary treatment. At the time the book was edited, there was but little evidence of figurative use. The OED lists some, from the 14th century to the 19th, but the editors of Webster's Second had no recent evidence and omitted a definition to cover figurative use (notes in the file show that the need for a figurative sense occurred to at least one editor). As a result, Bernstein and Follett, knowing from the Second that burgeon meant "to bud, sprout," were shocked to discover that it was being used in a much broader way in the public prints. And a usage problem was born. The evidence in our files suggests that the use of burgeon and especially the participial adjective burgeoning in a broader sense connoting rapid and flourishing growth began to increase in frequency in the late 1930s. Here it is, for instance, used in a book review: • With 1933 the focus takes in the Reichstag fire and burgeoning Hitlerism —NY. Times, 29 Jan. 1937 Widepsread popular use began around the end of World War II. Copperud 1970 credits much of this popularization to Time magazine. Indeed, it did appear in the pages of Time with some frequency: • Sometimes new settlements, unmarked on the maps, had burgeoned into large communities in only two or three years —Time, 7 Aug. 1944 • Quebec's burgeoning industries —Time, 16 Sept. 1946 • ... channeled the city's burgeoning population into neatly curving rows of comfortable frame houses — Time, 12 Dec. 1949 The use was not limited to Time, however: • ... who learns that the little stitch in the side is cancer and that he is carrying around inside himself that mysterious, apocalyptic, burgeoning thing which is part of himself but is, at the same time, not part of himself but the enemy —Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, 1946 • The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars must accept responsibility for the drum majorette. They cannot escape it. It has been at their conventions that she has burgeoned —Frank Sullivan, A Rock in Every Snowball, 1946 • ... one could go on at length listing the burgeoning varieties of periodicals —Frederick Lewis Allen, Atlantic, November 1947 By the 1950s the extended senses were firmly established: • ... what may well be the most difficult period of the burgeoning Western alliance —Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, 10 Nov. 1951 • ... there is in Japan a hospitality toward ... the American way of life which is sincere, clear-eyed, burgeoning with affection —Perry Miller, Atlantic, August 1953 • Suburban towns with burgeoning populations need more police and fire protection —NY. Times, 28 Feb. 1954 • ... not one of those feminizing Faulknerians, who via Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty have burgeoned into the fullblown epicene school —Leslie A. Fiedler, New Republic, 26 Sept. 1955 • ... the high walls of the Kremlin were burgeoning with new mysteries —Harrison E. Salisbury, TV. Y. Times Mag., 21 Aug. 1955 The evidence makes the point. The extended uses of burgeon had been appearing in the august pages of the New York Times for more than a quarter century before Theodore Bernstein looked up a dated entry in Webster's Second and made an issue out of it. It is probably impossible anyway to pen in the meaning of a word once it begins to be frequently used figuratively. Uses with the connotation of rapid or flourishing growth are the predominant ones today. The budding connotation has not been lost, as the following two examples show, but it is now a less frequent use: • I weighed this. It sounded promising. Hope began to burgeon —P. G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning, 1946 • ... the so-called 'little renaissance" in poetry then burgeoning —Robert E. Spiller, CEA Critic, January 1971 • "Ah," you may object, "couldn't Spiller's use mean 'flourishing'?" Yes, it could be so interpreted; you have discovered the difficulty of pinning down a figurative use to a single interpretation. Unless you are a lover of causes that were lost before they were begun, do not trouble yourself to limit burgeon to "to bud, sprout." There is no essential difference between the usage of the 1970s and 1980s and that of the 1940s and 1950s with this word. |
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