| 词组 | wean |
| 释义 | wean A peculiar extension in the meaning of wean has occurred in the 20th century. The word means, in its literal sense, "to accustom (a child) to take food other than by nursing," and, in an established figurative sense, "to detach from a cause of dependence or preoccupation": • Despite gallant efforts to wean the populace from the tube —Carll Tucker, Saturday Rev., 15 Sept. 1979 Increasingly common, however, is the use of wean as a figurative synonym of raise or rear. Our earliest evidence of this use is from the letters of Fred Allen: • Babies are being weaned on aspirin to fortify them for the economic headaches they will certainly face —Fred Allen, letter, 6 May 1931 • You are too late to stunt Figgi's growth. He should have been weaned on black coffee —Fred Allen, letter, 11 Dec. 1933 No doubt other people besides Allen were using wean in this way in the 1930s (and perhaps earlier), but, curiously, we have no further evidence of such usage until 1958: • Boswell, who happens to come from a line of English coach builders and who was weaned on timber, so to speak —Ernest O. Hauser, Saturday Evening Post, 9 Aug. 1958 The new use of wean was noticed and criticized by Bernstein 1965, but we did not begin to encounter it with any frequency in print until the 1970s. We now find it occurring in a wide range of publications: • ... I was carefully weaned on G. A. Henty —Glen Frankfurter, Books in Canada, October 1972 • ... a handsome Conservative MP who can be said to have been weaned in the television studios — Hardcastle, Punch, 2 Oct. 1974 • ... Parisians, weaned on truffles and sauces —Ted Burke, Town & Country, June 1976 • ... State Department veterans weaned on the notion that good will can be measured in dollars given away — Wall Street Jour., 27 Aug. 1982 • Musicians weaned on the free jazz of the sixties — Gary Giddins, Atlantic, November 1982 • Weaned on the microcomputer, ... these pubescent youngsters have been hailed ... —Frank Rose, Science 82, November 1982 • ... speak as if they were weaned on Twinings English Breakfast Tea —Jay Mclnerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984 • ... a writer weaned on the short story —N. Y. Times Book Rev., 17 Mar. 1985 Exactly how this use of wean originated is hard to say. It may be that such a phrase as "weaned on timber" was meant to suggest that timber was the form of nourishment, figuratively speaking, which took the place of nursing when the child was weaned. Or perhaps it was a simple case of confusion about the meaning of wean. The question is now academic, in any case, since it is apparent that the new sense of wean has established an independent existence for itself, apart from the literal meaning of the word. Its eventual appearance in dictionaries is just a matter of time, if its use continues at its current rate. It has not yet acquired the status of a full-blooded usage controversy, but that too may be just a matter of time. |
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