| 词组 | madding crowd |
| 释义 | madding crowd Evans 1957, Reader's Digest 1983, and Harper 1985 claim that the phrase madding crowd, which comes down to us from Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" (1750) via the title of Thomas Hardy's novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), is commonly miscorrected to maddening crowd. Both Reader's Digest and Harper advise against using the term; Reader's Digest calls it a cliché. Evans takes a laissez-faire attitude about the spelling and is noncommittal about the use. The evidence in the Merriam-Webster citation files, on the other hand, shows that the phrase is in fact rarely changed to maddening crowd in print. To the extent that the problem is real, it must be a problem of speech. • You will never catch us in the surging, madding crowds —Goodman Ace, Saturday Rev., 11 Dec. 1971 • ... the President was kept as far as possible from the potentially madding crowd —The Economist, 23 Nov. 1974 And while it is easier to call something a cliché than to prove that it is not one, this phrase appears with no more than reasonable frequency and might be more aptly and flatteringly described as an allusion. The phrase, after all, serves a purpose, and there is no good reason not to use it. |
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