| 词组 | you |
| 释义 | you 1. You may have noticed that the editors of this book have often used you in addressing you, the reader, directly. Our reason for doing so is well described in this comment: • Bernstein and Copperud agree that the use of you to address the reader ... conduces to informality and directness —Copperud 1970 Quite a number of commentators also remark that you can use one instead of you when you want to be more formal, distant, and impersonal. They sensibly warn, however, that you should be careful not to mix the formal one with the more informal you. One pays one's money and takes one's choice, as it were. 2.Indefinite "you. " Related to the use of you to address the reader directly is the use of you to address no one in particular—in indefinite reference. Such use has apparently been something of a bugbear to college composition teachers. In Woolley & Scott 1926, the indefinite you received top billing under the Misuses of Pronouns heading, ranking ahead of the indefinite they and the use of it without an antecedent. Recent college handbooks still mention it, although its status has been downgraded (Prentice Hall 1988, for instance, runs they and it ahead of you). Woolley & Scott prescribed either one or the passive voice. Both of these prescriptions have provided grist for other usage writers: some American writers find one sniffishly British (see one 1 ) and a goodly number object to the passive (see passive voice). More recent writers are perhaps aware of dissatisfaction with the easy solutions of the past, and are therefore somewhat more willing to accept the indefinite you. They all stress its informality, however. • And so every Southern household when they bought books they bought Scott. That was because you got more words for your money, maybe —William Faulkner, 13 May 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 • You can be the most important congressman in the country, but you had better not forget the people back home —Tip O'Neill with William Novak, Man of the House, 1987 • How much domestic spending did you have to cut to get a balanced budget in 1984 after the tax cut and defense increase? —David A. Stockman, Newsweek, 28 Apr. 1986 • You drive through the average city or even the average village these days, and the houses are so close together... that there's no place for the kids to play but in the street —And More by Andy Rooney, 1982 • After the forward pass was legalized, in 1906, the most versatile backs were triple threats: you didn't know whether they would run, pass, or kick the ball —Herbert Warren Wind, New Yorker, 18 Jan. 1982 You in these examples is not directed at the reader, but the informal effect is similar; it is rather more like listening to someone talk than reading a formal exposition. Perrin & Ebbitt 1972 says that you is more common than one in general writing and that it is not rare even in formal writing. There is good literary precedent for the usage: the OED has examples from Bacon, Swift, and Ruskin. And a recent editor of the 14th-century poem Pearl has found the usage there. But many of the handbook writers and the composition teachers brought up on them are still chary of you. The direct, intimate effect of you is also cultivated by writers of fiction, autobiography, and fictionalized autobiography who are looking for the immediacy of talk: • In seventh grade they were always assigning you to write about things like farm produce —Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982 • ... I was as happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love —Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, 1935 • You went for the small things, the molded metal car models that would fit in your palm, you watched the lady in her green smock —E. L. Doctorow, Loon Lake, 1979 3. The history of the pronoun you provides a good example of the effect social forces can have on the language. You began as the accusative and dative form of the second person plural pronoun. The nominative plural was ye. The form used to address one person in centuries past was thou (thee was the accusative and dative form of the singular). As far back as the 14th century, the plural forms ye and you began to be used to address one person—usually a superior—as a mark of deference and respect. Curme 1931 conjectures that this use may be related to the use of the first-person plural we by sovereigns: Jespersen 1909-49 (vol. 2) lays it to French politeness at work in Middle English. However it began, the use of the polite plural gradually grew: Strang 1970 points out that such a use once begun must grow, since people would rather be polite than risk giving offense in cases of doubt. So as the use of the plural increased, the singular became the special use, the limited form. By about the beginning of the 17th century, thou and thee marked an intimate or personal relationship, or a superior to inferior relationship (Evans 1962 quotes the prosecutor of Sir Walter Raleigh using thou in deliberate disrespect). Then by about the middle of the 16th century the contrast in function between ye and you began breaking down. Henry Sweet, in his New English Grammar ( 1892), attributed part of the breakdown to sound: there seems to have been a tendency to push ye into uses that matched the rhyming thee and you into those that matched the rhyming (then) thou. Ben Jonson's early-17th-century Grammar listed you and ye as simple variants, while thou and thee retained their traditional functions. Wyld 1920 observes that the first Queen Elizabeth seems to have used only you in writing; a user of her prestige must surely have given you a boost. Wyld also says that in 16th-century usage there was much more use of you as a nominative than of ye as an accusative or dative—in other words, you was expanding its range at the expense of ye. This process has continued, although ye has not disappeared entirely (see ye, pronoun). The displacement of the singular pronouns did not go entirely unnoticed. In 1660 George Fox published an attack on those who used you as a singular, but it had no effect at all. Fox couched his attack in grammatical terms, but as Marckwardt 1958 points out, Fox was the leader of the Quakers, and there were political and religious motives behind his remarks. The Quakers believed in equality and disapproved you as an acknowledgment of one's betters. The loss of a singular pronoun for everyday use was noticed in the common speech and gave rise to various remedies. The first was to make the distinction between singular you and plural you by verb agreement; you was for the singular continued in polite if informal use well into the 18th century before it lost respectability (see you was). Special plural forms were later contrived to hold you chiefly to singular use; these include such formations as you-all (see you-all), you-uns, yez, and youse. None of these save you-all has enjoyed much success, or at least much prestige. So the simple social drive of good manners has in a few centuries completely remade the second person pronoun. No doubt the social pressures of today will work changes in the language as well. (For examples of changes that may be taking place, see person 2 and they, their, them 1.) The chances are, however, that most changes they bring about will not be rapid. |
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