| 词组 | watershed |
| 释义 | watershed Back in 1926, H. W. Fowler had this to say about the correct use of watershed: The original meaning of the word ... was the line of high land dividing the waters that flow in one direction from those that flow in the other. The older of us were taught that this was its meaning, & that the senses river-basin & area of collection & drainage-slope were mere ignorant guesses due to confusion with the familiar word shed. Fowler noted sadly that the "mistaken senses" had "found acceptance [even] with those who could appreciate the risks of ambiguity," but they certainly had not found acceptance with him. "The old sense should be restored & rigidly maintained," he wrote. Fifty-eight years later, James J. Kilpatrick had some thoughts of his own about watershed, specifically concerning its widespread figurative use to mean "a dividing point or line": • Properly speaking, a watershed is not a single point or a sharp line; it is a whole region or area in which water drains in a particular direction If we are determined to use clichés, let us use clichés with some feeling for accuracy. Indeed. It looks to a Fowlerian as if Kilpatrick has committed a howling blunder, but perhaps his mistake about what watershed means, "properly speaking," is not all that blameworthy. The physical sense of watershed that Kilpatrick knows is, in fact, far more common, at least in American English, than the older sense prescribed by Fowler. The older sense is still treated as the principal one in British dictionaries, but in American English Fowler's "line of high land" is known as a waterparting or divide. Most Americans, if they stopped to think about it, would probably be struck as Kilpatrick was by the apparent disparity between the literal sense and the figurative sense of watershed. Watershed seems to have originated as a translation of the German word Wasserscheide, with which it is synonymous in its oldest sense. The earliest evidence for watershed in the OED is from 1803. The senses to which Fowler objected began to appear in print several decades later—the "drainage-slope" sense in 1839 and the "river-basin" sense in 1874. By the end of the 19th century, the "river-basin" sense was firmly established in American English; it was entered as the first sense of watershed in Webster 1890. Our earliest evidence for the figurative use of watershed is from the 1920s: • ... follows a narrow path, a kind of "watershed" between biography and bibliography —D. B. Updike, Printing Types, 1922 • ... the quality of the expected settlement is best expressed in Mr. Chamberlain's phrase that it will be "a real watershed between peace and war...." — Manchester Guardian Weekly, 16 Oct. 1925 The quotation from Sir Austen Chamberlain perfectly illustrates the sense of watershed that is now so popular among politicians and journalists. We have sporadic evidence for this sense throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but it seems not to have caught on in a big way until about 1950. It is now far and away the most common sense of the word: • ... looks more and more like one of history's great watersheds —Stewart Alsop, Saturday Evening Post, 30 May 1964 • ... may turn out a watershed in the way people look at China —Ross Terrill, Atlantic, November 1971 • ... we may be experiencing a watershed phenomenon, a historic ideological turning point —Robert Lewis Shayon, Saturday Rev., 27 Nov. 1971 • ... to understand why evolution was such a watershed in the history of ideas —Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History, October 1984 • ... a sociological as well as a scientific watershed in astronomy —Wallace Tucker, Sky and Telescope, April 1985 When Sir Ernest Gowers revised Fowler's Modern English Usage in 1965, he concluded the discussion of watershed by noting hopefully that "the figurative use of watershed now in journalistic favor may help to preserve its proper meaning." However, the widespread figurative use of watershed has shown no sign of reviving its "proper meaning," at least in American English. We cannot be certain, but it appears likely that many of the people who now use watershed in its figurative sense have little idea what the word originally meant. |
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