| 词组 | mitigate |
| 释义 | mitigate This verb has several senses, but it functions primarily in current English as a synonym of alleviate, with suggestions of moderate: • ... to mitigate injustices in both communist and capitalist societies —John Wilkinson, Center Mag., March 1969 • ... mitigate the shocking conditions under which black people live there —Roger M. Williams, Saturday Rev., 30 Sept. 1978 • ... did little to mitigate their unhappiness —The Tower Commission Report, 1987 It is not a rare word, but neither is it an extremely common one, and many people no doubt feel less than sure about its meaning. This uncertainty has in recent decades led to its being used with against in place of the similar but unrelated verb militate, meaning "to have weight or effect": • ... some intangible and invisible social force that mitigates against him —"Centaur in Brass," in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1950 • The self-respect they engender mitigates against their repetition —Harvey Wheeler, Saturday Rev., 11 May 1968 • ... his looks tend to mitigate against him intellectually —David Halberstam, McCall's, November 1971 • ... they mitigate against inaccurate overstatement —Jeffrey Hirshberg, American Speech, Fall 1982 Such usage is comparable in several ways to the use of flaunt to mean "flout": it has its origins in the confusion of two similar words, it occurs primarily among educated people (poorly educated people are unlikely to use mitigate or militate in any sense), and it is universally regarded as an error by usage commentators. Flesch 1983 lays the blame for this confusion on a method of teaching reading that downplayed phonics and was quite popular in the U.S. for a time, but it would seem unlikely that this system of pedagogy had any effect on William Faulkner. Edmund Wilson, in The Bit Between My Teeth, 1965, assigns the blame to the disappearing habit of thinking in a Latin vocabulary. Perhaps both reasons contribute. Flesch thinks the confusion is very widespread, but our files show it not as common as flaunt-flout. Flesch also says that we should give up and accept it as an American idiom. Mitigate against may reach that status someday—it shows no sign of going away—but it has not done so yet, and your use of it will probably attract some critical attention. We suggest you limit your use of mitigate to its moderating sense and use militate against. See also flaunt, flout. |
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