| 词组 | let alone |
| 释义 | let alone The phrase let alone is used in a sort of conjunctive function in the sense "not to mention" for the purpose of emphasis. The use has been around since the early 19th century. Here are a few typical examples: • ... he never asserted that he could ordain a subdea-con, baptise, marry, impose penance, pronounce absolution, let alone say mass —A. F. Pollard, Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation, 1904 • ... it does so much worse for a million others that I don't feel justified in worrying let alone complaining —Robert Frost, letter, November 1914 • ... she had never felt strong enough for the journey—let alone to move and set up her household — Edmund Wilson, New Yorker, 5 June 1971 • ... else before now they would have owned the whole earth, let alone just Jefferson, Mississippi — William Faulkner, The Town, 1957 • He discovered that it is difficult to find good farm hands at any price, let alone for the wages he could afford to pay —Jack Cook, Blair & Ketchum's Country Jour., March 1983 • Back in 1924 the Lincoln Library pronounced this usage a vulgarism. No subsequent commentator—Krapp 1927, Opdyke 1939, Evans 1957, Bryant 1962, Bremner 1980, Einstein 1985—has agreed, so the issue can be called dead. Evans, Bryant, and Bremner do agree, however, that leave alone is not standard in the same use. This opinion seems to be related to American sensitivity to leave-let substitutions that British commentators seem to ignore. Our evidence for leave alone in this function is quite sparse, and almost all of it is British. Here are a couple of examples: • This argument ... does not serve the author as a starting-point for prophecy, leave alone for any planning for Utopia —Times Literary Supp., 6 Mar. 1943 • ... Mr. McKenzie deplored the fact that, when his shop had been recently broken into, the thieves would not even burgle, leave alone buy, his books — Michael Barratt, The Bookseller, 1 June 1974 Our only example from an American source is from a television play reprinted in a seventh-grade textbook. But the author is an Englishman living in Canada, the flight of the title is between two Canadian cities, and the doctor who has this line is presumably Canadian, too: • Can't buy one truck, leave alone forty —Arthur Hailey, "Flight into Danger" in Introduction to Literature, ed. Betty Yvonne Welch et al., 1981 We suspect that Americans simply do not use leave alone in this way. It seems to be only a rather rare variant in British English, but it does not appear to be substandard there. |
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