| 词组 | various |
| 释义 | various Various is sometimes used as a pronoun, usually followed by of: • ... various of these weeds also are poisonous to livestock —Wendell H. Camp, in The Scientists Look at Our World, 1952 • Various of the men, then Clark, and finally Lewis fell ill —Bernard De Voto, Minority Report, 1940, in The Practical Cogitator, ed. Charles P. Curtis, Jr. & Ferris Greenslet, 1945 This use was first cited in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (4th ed., 1877), which included a quotation from a correspondent in the New York Times: "I talked for an hour with various of them." The OED made no mention of this use in 1916, but by 1926 it was widespread enough for Fowler to warn against it: • ANALOGY has lately been playing tricks with the word & persuading many people that they can turn it at will, as several, few, many, divers, certain, some, & other words are turned, from an adjective into a pronoun To write various of them &c. is no better than to write different of them, diverse of them, or numerous or innumerable of them. Later commentators have echoed Fowler's sentiments. Their objections do not make it clear why various should necessarily be classed with adjectives like different rather than with those like several. Presumably the critics either fail to recognize that the pronoun various is derived from the sense of the adjective meaning "of an indefinite number greater than one" (as in "We stopped at various towns along the way"), or they regard this sense of the adjective as nonstandard (for more on this subject, see various different). In either case, their objections seem open to challenge. Be that as it may, those objections exist. If you use the pronoun various, you should be aware that many people will regard it as a mistake. See also numerous. |
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