| 词组 | witness |
| 释义 | witness An assortment of critics, beginning with Richard Grant White 1870, have had unkind things to say about the use of witness to mean "see." White noted that such usage occurred "with absurd effect," and he offered the following as an example: '"I declare,' an enthusiastic son of Columbia says, as he gazes upon New York harbor, 'this is the most splendid bay I ever witnessed.'" White explained that it is only correct to speak of witnessing an act, not a thing, such as a harbor or a mountain range or "a poodle dog." The same opinion has been expressed in this century by Bernstein 1965: "What is witnessed is an event, an occurrence, an action, perhaps even a situation, but not either a 'thing' or a person." Our evidence agrees with Bernstein's observation. The usage that he and White object to almost never occurs, at least in written English. A few other commentators have taken a different tack by criticizing the use of witness in contexts where the notions of testifying or acting as a legal witness to a particular act or occurrence are not involved, as in "Almost 50,000 spectators were on hand to witness the game." This is in fact one of the most common uses of the transitive verb witness: • ... the merchants had flocked thither ... to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments —F. Scott Fitzgerald, "May Day," 1920 • ... the most bitter scene I had ever witnessed — Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977 • I went to the ceremony at noon ... and there witnessed a scene which Germany had not seen since 1914 —William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1960 • ... have not been in a church for other than architectural reasons or to witness a marriage or funeral —John Kenneth Galbraith, The Scotch, 1964 This use of witness is old and well established. The OED shows that it first occurred in the 16th century. It is unquestionably standard English and is treated as such in dictionaries. |
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