| 词组 | catch |
| 释义 | catch Catch is a verb with a muddled history. It originally came to us from French, with regular principal parts—equivalent to catched—and with a meaning of "hunt, chase." Somehow it got muddled with an English verb that was the ancestor of latch (onto), from which it acquired its primary surviving meanings and an analogical past and past participle caught. The original meaning was taken up by a slightly later French import, the ancestor of chase, and catch was left with the meaning of latch and the competing verb forms catched and caught (while latch, in the meantime, had become regular, as it is today). The fickleness of literary usage with regard to catched and caught is curious. Lamberts 1972 notes caught in Shakespeare and the King James Bible; catched in Bun-yan, Steele, Defoe, and Isaac Watts. Shakespeare did use caught, but used catched once in a while; so did Spenser. Ben Jonson used both, but Marlowe in his plays and Sidney in his poems used caught only. Milton used both (but mostly caught in poetry), Donne used both, and Pope used both. Samuel Johnson seems to have used caught in his poems and catched in conversation. Dry-den and Swift, at least in their poetry, used only caught. After Johnson and Boswell it is hard to find literary catched. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats all use caught. Richard Grant White 1870 wrote that "no good writer now uses" catched for caught. He seems to be right, even now. Catched seriously contested caught in the 17th and 18th centuries but has now receded pretty much to dialectal use. The information in the Dictionary of American Regional English shows catched widespread but infrequent; caught is the prevalent form, even in speech, and the only form used seriously in writing. |
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