| 词组 | mishap |
| 释义 | mishap 1. A commercially prepared list of supposed solecisms gotten up a few years ago by a publisher for the purpose of promoting a line of supplementary educational materials contained the words "lucky mishap," which were apparently meant to imply that mishap is wrongly used by the unlettered in place of accident. Bernstein 1965 and Shaw 1975 are also at pains to distinguish accident and mishap. While chance is a primary attribute of both accident and mishap, mishap always implies an undesirable result, and accident need not. If indeed the two words are ever confused, such confusion has escaped our attention. We have no evidence that the two words are actually muddled and cannot persuade ourselves that this is a genuine problem. 2. Bernstein 1958, 1965, Harper 1975, 1985 (citing the Boston Globe style manual), Shaw 1975, and Bryson 1984 all maintain that mishap should be reserved for minor unwanted accidents. There are, however, several factors working against the success of such a restriction. First, there is history. The association of triviality with mishap is recent; older literary citations carry no such connotation. In Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, for instance, the old Syracusan merchant >Egeon tells "sad stories of [his] own mishaps," which include a shipwreck in which his wife and one of his twin sons were lost. Although AZgzon knows they were rescued and not drowned, the level of triviality is still not on a par with, say, spilling a glass of milk. Second, the word is of a convenient length for newspaper headline writers, who often use it in place of the longer accident no matter how serious the occurrence. Thus we see headlines like these: • Practice Mishap Kills Driver —Springfield (Mass.) Morning Union, 8 Feb. 1984 • 30 die in mishap —The Times (London), cited in Bryson 1984 • J. J. ASTOR DROWNED IN LINER MISHAP — headline over the report of the sinking of the Titanic, cited in Howard 1984 The headline use can carry over into ordinary prose: • ... no mention of his having been killed in an auto mishap —Gregory Corso, Evergreen, August 1967 • The consequences of mishap are real. Two thousand villagers in Palomares, Spain, were exposed to radioactive debris —New Republic, 19 Mar. 1966 But undeniably mishap is also used for trivial occurrences: • ... directed the concert without any of the mishaps expected of a twenty-year-old's performance —Current Biography I95I • All sorts of little mishaps can blight a Broadway production —Bowen Northrup, Wall Street Jour., 24 July 1972 • ... provoked by some mishap in the kitchen —Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982 And sometimes no one can know how serious or trivial the mishap may be: • They spent many hours in a simulated capsule ... preparing themselves for the possibility of mishap during flight —Current Biography, November 1965 In actual use, then, mishap may be applied to either serious or inconsequential occurrences, always unfortunate for the person involved. The wish to restrict it to minor accidents is perhaps slightly off the mark. The particular effect of mishap in most modern use is to downplay the seriousness of what happened, rather than to describe it. We see it used deliberately for this purpose: • A spokesman for Metropolitan Edison, owners of the plant, insisted for several hours that a "mechanical mishap" had occurred, not a nuclear accident —H. L. Stevenson, UPI Reporter, 5 Apr. 1979 Mishap, then, is likely to be the word of choice when the unfortunate accident is of a trivial nature, and also when it seems desirable to downplay its seriousness. |
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