| 词组 | whose |
| 释义 | whose 1. Whose, of which. The misinformation that passes for gospel wisdom about English usage is sometimes astounding. A correspondent in 1986 wanted us to help him choose between two sentences containing of which; he had used of which to refer to the word house, he said, and had not used whose because it is "not formal." Not formal! Look at these passages: • I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul...—Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1601 • ... a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass —Deuteronomy 8:9 (AV), 1611 • Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the World ...—Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667 • Relentless walls! whose darksome round contains Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains—Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard," 1717 • ... Past and Future be the wings On whose support harmoniously conjoined • Moves the great spirit of human knowledge ...—William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 It would be hard to find passages surpassing these in formality and solemnity. Since English is not blessed with a genitive form for that or which, whose—originally the genitive of what and who—has been used to supply the missing forms since sometime in the 14th century. No one seems to have thought the use worthy of notice until the 18th century. Lowth 1762 mentioned it somewhat equivocally in a footnote, disapproving its use in passages from Dryden and Addison, but apparently not objecting to such use in "the higher Poetry, which loves to consider everything as bearing a personal character." He cites the lines from Paradise Lost quoted above as the example of higher poetry. Priestley 1761 is also equivocal: • The word whose begins likewise to be restricted to persons, but it is not done so generally but that good writers, and even in prose, use it when speaking of things. I do not think, however, that the construction is generally pleasing. Lindley Murray 1795 is similarly of two minds, noting the use with seeming approval—"By the use of this license, one word is substituted for three"—in one place and then reprinting Priestley's opinion verbatim in another. After Lowth and Priestley had let the genie of disapproval out of the bottle, however tentatively, there was no putting it back. Leonard 1929 lists several other 18th-century grammarians in disapproval (including Noah Webster in 1798); Goold Brown 1851 carries the list into the 19th century, noting especially one T. O. Churchill ( 1823) as pronouncing "this practice is now discountenanced by all correct writers." Even Henry Bradley in the OED says that whose is "usually replaced by of which, except where the latter would produce an intolerably clumsy form." Goold Brown, after citing various opinions as to the propriety of whose, many hedged round with exceptions for personification and solemn poetry, observes: "Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more." Indeed. Hall 1917 read and, somewhat to his surprise, found whose used of inanimate things in some 140 authors, in more than 1,000 passages, from the 15th century to the early 20th. Once again we find the peculiar situation of usage commentary: the grammarians are very attentive to one another's opinions, and the standard authors pay them no attention at all. (See, for another example, the history of the controversy over the placement of only, at only 1.) The force that has always worked against acceptance of whose used of inanimate things is its inevitable association with who. The force that has always worked in its favor was suggested by Murray: it provides not only a shorter but a smoother and more graceful transition than the alternative "the ... of which." Its common occurrence in poetry undoubtedly owes more to its graceful quality than to any supposed love of personification among poets. In prose as well, the value of gracefulness (or, at least, the value of avoiding awkwardness) is generally recognized by good writers. As a result, this is one disputed usage that is perhaps more likely to occur in the works of good writers than bad ones: • ... villages and farms whose inhabitants reflect the various cultures —Norman Douglas, Siren Land, 1911 • ... house in one of whose rooms was a striker wounded by Adkin's men —Sinclair Lewis, Cheap and Contented Labor, 1929 • ... an adventure whose meaning scholars will debate for centuries —Theodore H. White, The Reporter, 28 Apr. 1953 • ... a world whose values were becoming totally materialist —Stephen Spender, New Republic, 20 July 1953 • ... a wonderful book ... whose author is the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke —e e cummings, New Republic, 2 Nov. 1953 • ... that quality whose absence from the English middle-class mind was so deplored —Steven Marcus, Partisan Rev., January-February 1954 • ... a precaution whose necessity was demonstrated a while back —Lewis Mumford, New Yorker, 6 Apr. 1957 • ... a gay small lamp whose shade was orange —John Updike, Couples, 1968 In the last half of the 20th century we find the subject of whose and of which discussed in most of the current books; not one of them finds whose anything but standard. But what about our correspondent? We have to wonder where he got the notion that whose is not formal. And this also gives us pause: the Leonard usage survey of 1932 found whose to be considered established by the group of respondents as a whole, but when Crisp replicated the survey in 1971, whose was rated disputable by the group as a whole. In College English in 1974 Mary Vaiana Taylor published (in an article aptly titled "The Folklore of Usage") the results of some surveys she had conducted; her survey of college and university teaching assistants showed that 67 percent of them would mark whose wrong in a student's paper. The specter of the 18th-century grammarian is still loose in the land. The notion that whose may not properly be used of anything except persons is a superstition; it has been used by innumerable standard authors from Wycliffe to Updike, and is entirely standard as an alternative to of which the in all varieties of discourse. 2.Whose, who's. Nearly every handbook right down to the level of the fifth grade or so is at pains to distinguish whose, possessive pronoun, from who's, contraction of who is, who has. In spite of Bishop Lowth's glossing of whose as who's in 1762, no one today is supposed to confuse the two. Since they are pronounced the same, however, people do muddle them. • Teaching Reading and Writing Skills: Whose Responsible —brochure for a New England educational conference, reprinted in New Yorker, 21 Mar. 1983 • ... a melting man whose dying anyway —student paper cited in Robert Pattison, On Literacy, 1982 • When others are called for cross-checking, who's timing is always right? —advt., cited in Simon 1980 These are errors of inattention, of course, and to be avoided. |
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