| 词组 | without |
| 释义 | without The use of without as a conjunction meaning "unless" was once perfectly respectable: • A very reverent body. Ay, such a one as a man may not speak of without he say 'sir-reverence' —Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, 1593 • That any laud to me thereof should grow, Without my plumes from others' wings I take—Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 1591 By the 18th century, however, it had fallen far enough from grace for Samuel Johnson to note in his 1755 Dictionary that it was "not in use." (The 1798 edition of Johnson's Dictionary says "not in use, except in conversation.") Noah Webster, who argued unpersuasively that this without was actually a preposition rather than a conjunction, also noted in his Dictionary (1828) that "This use of without, is nearly superseded by unless and except, among good writers and speakers; but is common in popular discourse or parlance." Although evidence in the OED (including quotations from Tennyson and the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes) shows that both Johnson and Webster were somewhat premature in their observations on the conjunctive without, it is clear that they were essentially correct in noting its lack of written use. Since the late 19th century, this conjunction has occurred rarely in print except in representations of illiterate or dialectal speech: • You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer —Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884 • "... There ain't none in the oil-shed, that I do know—without there might be a bit in the wash'us— but it'll have been there a long time," she concluded dubiously —Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon, 1937 • "Doctor'll be here soon, without the snow holds him up ..." —H. E. Bates, Selected Stories, 1957 See also against 1. |
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