| 词组 | cancel out |
| 释义 | cancel out Freeman 1983 tells us that a meeting that is discontinued is canceled, not canceled out. To this we can say that he is correct insofar as our evidence is reliable. Cancel out is not used in the transitive sense of cancel meaning "to call off." Cancel out is, however, in idiomatic use with other senses of cancel. Harper 1985 says cancel out is often heard from bureaucrats. This we cannot confirm, as we do not have a single citation from a bureaucrat; cancel out is apparently not even used by the Postal Service, where many bureaucrats are employed. Harper also calls cancel out redundant, which is their way of telling you that some people use out idiomatically with cancel and others do not. Here are some completely acceptable examples of the senses in which cancel out is used. As an intransitive, cancel out is used chiefly in the sense "to neutralize each other's effect": • ... these colors cancel out and make the room poorer than it would have been if a more limited palette had been used —Lewis Mumford, New Yorker, 15 Oct. 1955 • ... the various pressure groups to a large degree canceled out —James B. Conant, Atlantic, May 1946 It also occurs in mathematics: • The units "cancel out," and the ratio remains 4:5 — William L. Schaaf, Mathematics For Everyday Use, 1942 And it is used in the intransitive equivalent of "to call off an event": • ... a little rain wouldn't make people cancel out — Jeff Brown, Holiday, June 1966 • ... we've more than once landed our rebuilt army warplanes on Chicago's Maywood field when other lines canceled out —Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953 The most frequent use, however, is the transitive sense that means "to match in force or effect, offset": • ... a state whose two Senators representing 100,000 permanent residents, can cancel out the votes cast by the Senators representing the fourteen million residents ... —D. W. Brogan, in Aspects of American Government, ed. Sydney D. Bailey, 1950 • ... just as his irritability cancelled out his natural kindness —Osbert Sitwell, Horizon, July 1947 • ... every definite piece of advice he gives is cancelled out by another, equally definite, contrary piece of advice —Times Literary Supp., 29 Apr. 1955 • Ironies breed before our eyes, cancel each other out —Irving Kristol, Encounter, December 1954 • When smoking cigarettes, I should drink green tea to cancel out the poison —Shirley Glaser, New York, 27 Sept. 1971 • Pratt's conversation often seems to cancel itself out, as do some of his lyrics: "Who am I talking to I know but I don't know " —Ken Emerson, New Times, 20 Aug. 1976 |
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