| 词组 | meticulous |
| 释义 | meticulous This adjective, which is derived ultimately from the Latin metus, "fear," was a rare word until about the turn of the 20th century, after which it became both common and, for a time, controversial. The OED shows that it had some use in the 16th and 17th centuries as a fancy synonym of fearful and timid, but by 1700 it had fallen into disuse. In the 19th century it acquired (apparently by way of the French méticuleux) a second sense, "overly careful about small details": • The decadence of Italian prose composition into laboured mannerism and meticulous propriety — John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, 1877 (OED) This sense in turn gave rise to what is now its almost invariable sense, "painstakingly careful." Meticulous has been widely used in this sense for many decades: • ... gave to the fashioning of the written word all the fastidious, meticulous austerity of devotion that she knew —Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot, 1923 • His meticulous integrity in business and his accuracy in money matters —Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau, 1939 • ... she had observed a meticulous neutrality.... nothing could have been more correct than the behavior of her Government —Sir Winston Churchill, The Unrelenting Struggle, 1942 • The meticulous care with which the operation in Sicily was planned has paid dividends —Franklin D. Roosevelt, fireside chat, 28 July 1943, in Nothing to Fear, ed. B. D. Zevin, 1946 • ... that fulness and meticulous documentation which the scholar requires —Gay Wilson Allen, Saturday Rev., 5 Feb. 1955 • ... a meticulous eye for detail —Howard E. Gruber, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 22 July 1979 • ... some kind of fine and meticulous craftsman — Doris Lessing, The Good Terrorist, 1985 The newly common meticulous attracted predictably unfavorable attention in the first half of the century. Its early critics (such as Fowler 1906) had no use for it in any sense, regarding it as a foreign affectation. But by about the 1930s the standard critical view had come to be that it was correctly used in its older and less common sense, "overly careful," and incorrectly used in its newer and popular sense, "painstakingly careful." The older sense was considered correct because it retains, however slightly, connotations of timidity and fearful-ness, while the newer sense has lost such connotations altogether. Dictionaries, including our own, were also slow to recognize the newer sense, and its failure to appear in standard references no doubt encouraged many people to regard it as an error. Theodore Bernstein, whose dictionary of choice was Webster's Second 1934 (in which the newer sense does not appear), was still insisting in 1965 that meticulous should only mean "timorously careful and overcareful." A newer dictionary would have told him differently, as would most of his fellow commentators (such as Evans 1957, Follett 1966, and Copperud 1970, 1980). The use of meticulous to mean "overly careful" is now rare. Its use to mean "painstakingly careful," on the other hand, is extremely common, and there is absolutely no question about its propriety. |
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