| 词组 | wait on, wait upon |
| 释义 | wait on, wait upon The use of wait on (sometimes wait upon) to mean "wait for," as in "We waited on him but he never came," has been attracting criticism for one reason or another for well over a century. H. L. Mencken in The American Language, Supplement I (1945) reports that an unidentified writer using the name Aristarcus attacked Noah Webster in a series of articles published in 1801, part of the argument of which concerned some real or imaginary Americanisms, including wait on for wait for. There seems to be no connection, however, between the attack on Webster, which was apparently politically motivated, and the criticism of wait on that can be found in many 20th-century usage books. Frederic G. Cassidy, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, is quoted in Safire 1980 as placing the start of the modern objection somewhere around the middle of the 19th century. Cassidy also discusses the geographical distribution of wait on. Basing his comments on materials collected for the DARE, he divides the U.S. into a Northern wait for area and a Southern wait on area. Dialectal studies conducted earlier broadly confirm the generalization, which can be interpreted to suggest that the objection to wait on is at least in part a matter of northern prejudice, the chief pedagogical publishers being located mainly in the north. Cassidy ascribes the present distribution of wait for and wait on to a standoff between "Southern conservatism and Northern schoolmarming." On the other side of the Atlantic, Foster 1968 records a resurgence in the use of wait on in the British press during the 1950s and especially the 1960s. He ascribes the revival to American influence. The written record, so far as we have collected it, shows that the wait on question is even more complicated than the preceding remarks would suggest. The OED records fifteen geographically unrestricted meanings for wait on, plus a couple of Scotticisms. Most of the senses of wait on are marked as obsolete in the OED, but several have survived, including the familiar "serve" sense, and the sense "to call on, pay a visit to." A sense "to accompany, go along with, escort," which is quite old, seems from OED and Dictionary of American English evidence to have survived at least into the 1880s. It can be found in the works of Shakespeare, Evelyn, Congreve, Defoe, Cleland, and Washington Irving, among others. The Dictionary of American English and the American Dialect Dictionary both record an American specialization of the "call on" sense: "to pay court to." The OED further notes a use frequent in the King James Bible: • Say not thou, I will recompense evil; but wait on the Lord, and he shall save thee —Proverbs 20:22 (AV), 1611 The OED definitions that equate to various uses of wait for are all attested in the second half of the 17th century (Milton and Bunyan are among those cited). Lack of 18th- and 19th-century evidence undoubtedly led the editor, Henry Bradley, to mark them obsolete. Because the uses began to crop up again in the middle of the 19th century, however, it is unlikely that they had vanished altogether; they must have survived beyond the watchful eye of dictionary editors. The earliest American example in the ADD is dated 1852, but you will recall that wait on came up in the 1801 attack on Webster, so it had clearly survived in this country. It had survived in England, too: • ... no groups of idle or of busy reapers could here stand waiting on the guidance of a master, for there was no farm here —Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, 1851 Carlyle probably learned the phrase from usage prevalent north of Hadrian's Wall. It seems not improbable that the post-World War II revival in British English resulted as much from latent native memory as from American stimulation. Here, for instance, it crops up in a work by an Australian author: • ... I ventured to observe that "Foote's trick of waiting on a laugh was old " —Hugh McCrae, Story- Book Only, 1948 This citation is from a group of anecdotes written in imitation or parody of BoswelPs Life of Samuel Johnson, and we do not know whether McCrae used wait on naturally, thought it was an 18th-century literary use (something it was not, in fact), or used it as a bit of theater terminology. In any case, examples of wait on from other parts of the Commonwealth are not hard to find: • They all began drifting off. Mac waited on Bob and me —A. P. Gaskell, "The Big Game," in New Zealand Short Stories, ed. D. M. Davin, 1953 But he wouldn't burn it tonight, because we were waiting on Johnny. • 'Is there any sign of him?' said Mammie, when Daddy came in again —Michael McCaverty, "Pigeons," in The Best British Short Stories 1936, ed. Edward J. O'Brien • ... courtship is unduly prolonged and marriage has to wait on the price of the wedding —John D. Sheridan, Irish Digest, February 1955 • Even the ceiling looked as if it was waiting on something —Richard Llewellyn, None But the Lonely Heart, 1943 • The fridge I'd been waiting on 12 months was delivered within two days of your notification —letter, Sunday Post (Glasgow), 19 July 1964 This quick survey takes in a fair number of varieties of British English and drops us back in Scotland where we began with Carlyle. It is really not surprising, then, that wait on has reappeared in mainstream British English. • But this should not wait on private capital which is especially hard to find in a drought-stricken land — Lord Rennell, Geographical Jour., September 1953 • ... hours spent in line waiting on eightpence-worth of beef—Leslie Eytle, London Calling, 25 Feb. 1954 • ... negotiation at Geneva must wait upon disengagement in Syria —The Economist, 2 Feb. 1974 • We have done our best to give the crops a good start and now we must wait on Nature —Country Life, 9 May 1947 The ADD shows that wait on for wait for was once fairly widespread in American use. The bulk of the material is Southern and Midland, but here and there bits of northern evidence are seen. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) is cited, for example; it is set in western Massachusetts. If recent evidence from speech shows wait on to be predominantly Southern and Midland, the evidence from printed sources since around World War II does not appear to be so limited. Here is a sampling: • An adequate answer to these questions must wait on the survey I have mentioned —James B. Conant, Report of the President of Harvard University to the Board of Overseers, 1940-1941 • But settlement of the big problems still waited on Russia —Time, 6 Nov. 1944 • While waiting on events to shape the answer ... — Samuel Lubell, Saturday Rev., 21 Dec. 1952 • ... pictures, which once had to wait upon the slow processes of wood engraving —Frank Luther Mott, The News in America, 1952 • ... the rest must wait on public realization, acceptance, and support —Bernard DeVoto, Harper's, August 1952 • For two days I've been waiting on weather. A general storm area hovers over the Rocky Mountains — Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953 • I couldn't make out from your letter whether Harper was waiting on me for approval —E. B. White, letter, 14 May 1954 • The funeral would not wait upon a man's ability to pay for it —Oscar Handlin, The American People in the Twentieth Century, 1954 • ... they've been waiting on a new novel from him for over six years —Hamilton Basso, The View from Pompey's Head, 1954 • I don't want to undertake something you don't want me to undertake. I therefore wait upon your word — Archibald MacLeish, letter, September 1955 • ... problems whose solutions have long waited upon the coordinated worldwide scale of the IGY effort — Newsweek, 9 July 1956 • ... there was another one waiting on me when I got back —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 5 May 1956 • ... the staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown —Maya Angelou, in Exploring Literature, ed. Louise Grindstaff et al., 1981 • She sat in the back of the store, her pencil over a ledger, while he stood and waited on children to make up their minds —Eudora Welty, in The Contemporary Essay, ed. Donald Hall, 1984 • A true measure of Borg's achievement, however, must wait on a comparison with other individual sports and sportsmen —Curry Kirkpatrick, Sports Illustrated, 16 July 1979 • ... the boredom of the black Africans sitting there, waiting on the whims of a colonial bureaucracy — Vincent Canby, N.Y. Times, 23 Jan. 1983 • ... doesn't care to sit around waiting on a House that's virtually paralyzed —Glenn A. Briere, Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican, 8 Apr. 1984 Note that the meaning of wait on (and wait upon) varies in these passages. The use of wait on that is most often singled out for criticism in usage books occurs when it is clearly equivalent to wait for in the sense "await; await the arrival, appearance, or occurence of," as in Flannery O'Connor's "... there was another one waiting on me when I got back." This is the use of wait on that appears to be most strongly identified with the South and Midland, and that is probably least likely to occur in general writing outside those areas. The other uses of wait on illustrated above are also more or less equivalent to wait for, but they suggest other meanings; such as "to wait in deference to or because of or "to be dependent on." These uses of wait on have not attracted the attention of usage commentators, even though many of them insist that wait on should only be used to mean "to serve" in writing. We conclude that wait on for wait for cannot be accurately characterized as dialectal, colloquial, regional, or substandard; on the contrary, it is found in standard and widely circulated sources. If it has been the mission of Northern teachers to stamp out wait on, they have failed in more places than just the South. Wait for continues to be more common, as it has been since the 18th century, especially in the North and especially when its meaning is clearly "to await." But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with wait on or its occasional variant wait upon. If the use of wait on is natural to you, there is certainly no need to avoid it. |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。