| 词组 | loan, lend |
| 释义 | loan, lend Copperud 1970, 1980 states flatly that the idea that loan is not good form as a verb is a superstition, but a surprisingly large number of commentators nonetheless express reservations about it. Among them are these, all Americans: Einstein 1985, Kilpatrick 1984, Bell & Cohn 1981, Bernstein 1965, 1971, 1977, Strunk & White 1959, 1972, 1979, Nickles 1974. In addition other commentators note a preference for lend in formal discourse—for instance Perrin & Ebbitt 1972 and Shaw 1970. Here is a recent comment: • We do not accept, for example, that the noun loan can be used as a verb when lend is already there for that purpose, even though the banking community not only accepts it but is its most frequent user (or abuser) —Einstein 1985 The banking community aside, Mr. Einstein is essentially repeating a century-old opinion that can be traced back at least as far as Richard Grant White 1870. But before we go into the history of the usage dispute, we should examine the history of the word. The verb loan was among the words brought to America by early English-speaking settlers who, in the words of James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's." Its history is succinctly summed up by Albert H. Marckwardt (American English, 1958): • Verbal loan originated in England, perhaps as early as 1200, although the earliest examples are somewhat doubtful. There is no question, however, about the authenticity of lonyng as it appears in the state papers of Henry VIII, and two seventeenth-century citations recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary are equally unmistakable. American writings employ loan in a verbal function as early as 1729, and indeed all of the Oxford English Dictionary citations for the eighteenth century are drawn from American sources. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American writers continue to furnish the bulk of evidence for its use, and the 1864 edition of Webster seems to have been the first dictionary to record it. In other words, verbal loan fell into disuse in England after the 17th century but continued in use in America, which was essentially cut off from the literary and intellectual life of England, especially among those least susceptible to English influence. In 1796 an English traveler in America named Thomas Twining noticed to loan used by "the least cultivated ranks of society" (quotation in Dictionary of American English). By the middle of the 19th century British letters were not as unfamiliar in the United States as they had been in earlier centuries, and American men of letters show some awareness of a certain provincial tone in the use of loan as a verb. James Russell Lowell put it in a fictitious press notice he wrote to fill up a blank page in the first series of The Biglow Papers ( 1848): • ... we copy for our readers a short fragment of a pastoral by him, the manuscript of which was loaned us by a friend. Lowell probably thought the word just right for a smalltown editor. He commented on it in the introduction to the second series of The Biglow Papers ( 1867): Loan for lend, with which we have hitherto been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so long ago as in 'Albion's England.' (in Dictionary of American English) Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner (1861) also contains a comment: • Loaned, as the inland folks say, when they mean 'lent.' (quoted in Lounsbury 1908) Perhaps such literary lights as Holmes and Lowell found the verb loan countrified or provincial, but Richard Grant White 1870 went further and declared it wrong: "Loan is not a verb, but a noun." White based his objection on his derivation of the noun from the past participle of the Anglo-Saxon verb laenan; Lounsbury 1908 demonstrated that White was unable to tell a verb from a noun in Old English. (For lovers of etymology: loan, the noun, is of Scandinavian origin; it had replaced the related Old English word of the same meaning—"gift or loan"—by early Middle English; its earliest use as a verb is by functional shift.) Nevertheless, the pronouncement stuck; from White it spread to William Cullen Bryant's Index Expurgatorius for the New York Evening Post (first published in 1877), Compton 1898, Vizetelly 1906, Bierce 1909, MacCracken & Sandison 1917, and so on down to 1985. British commentators appear satisfied in the main to label loan an Americanism and to assert the correctness of lend in British English. Fowler 1926 notes loan's survival in the U.S. and "locally in U.K." Gowers 1948, however, notes with distaste the use of to loan in British government writing; in his revision of Fowler 1965 he changed "locally in U.K." to "and has now returned to provide us with a NEEDLESS VARIANT." How is the verb loan actually used? The most striking thing is that it is used literally: you can loan money, books, art works, clothing, equipment, people or their services. Lend is also used for these purposes, but only lend is used for figurative purposes, such as lending a hand, lending an ear, or lending enchantment. It is a great joke of some usage writers (for instance, Bernstein, Einstein, Kilpatrick) to deride the use of loan by plugging it into Shakespeare: Loan me your ears. However, no one except facetious usage commentators appears ever to have used loan in such a way. Here are some samples of how loan has been used: • ... a little matter of nine dollars and sixty-two cents ... which he had loaned him about eighteen months ago, afore he had knowed him well —Petroleum V. Nasby, "The Reward of Virtue," 1866, in The Mirth of a Nation, ed. Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1983 • I wonder if Frederic Melcher of The Publishers Weekly wouldnt loan you his copy —Robert Frost, letter, 26 Mar. 1936 • ... she offered to loan me the money —Archibald MacLeish, letter, 4 Feb. 1929 • Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town —William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily," in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1950 • ... to the National Gallery he loans a picture —Eric Partridge, in British and American English Since 1900, 1951 • ... an island cottage that Mittler owned and loaned them —John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957 • ... telling him he wasn't going to loan him the eighty dollars —And More by Andy Rooney, 1982 • ... the Magna Carta, which was being loaned to the United States for the Bicentennial —Tip O'Neill with William Novak, Man of the House, 1987 Loan as a verb is entirely standard, having been in use since the 16th century, at least; carried over to this continent in the language of early settlers, it has continued in use ever since. Its use is predominantly American and includes literature but not the more elevated kinds of discourse. If you use loan remember that its regular use is literal; for figurative expressions, you must use lend. There is a curious disagreement about the past tenses of loan and lend in a few sources. Copperud 1970, 1980 notes that loaned seems to be used in place of lent; Perrin & Ebbitt 1972 makes the same observation; Kilpatrick 1984 admits the practice. But Einstein 1985 asserts the opposite—that lent is used for the past of both lend and loan. Our citational evidence is unable to confirm either observation. |
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