| 词组 | ceremonial, ceremonious |
| 释义 | ceremonial, ceremonious Ceremonious is a word brought in from the French in the 16th century. It was first used as a synonym for ceremonial, which had been brought in from the French in the 14th century. George Campbell, in his 1776 Philosophy of Rhetoric, seems to have been the first person to try to distinguish the two; he disparaged the use of ceremonious as a synonym for ceremonial and said that ceremonious properly related to a form of civility and ceremonial to a religious rite. No one in the 19th century seems to have followed up on Campbell. Fowler 1926 revived the question, but was apparently unaware of Campbell's distinction, which he could have elaborated slightly to the advantage of his own article, had he known it. Fowler begins with a distinction that initially seems clear enough, relating ceremonial to the countable use of ceremony ("a piece of ritual") and ceremonious to the use that is not countable ("attention to forms"), but the following discussion and example are not entirely transparent. Later commentators, including Copperud 1970, 1980, Heritage 1969, 1982, Longman 1984, Harper 1985, Shaw 1975, and Reader's Digest 1983, have concentrated primarily on trying to make Fowler's treatment clear. Sometimes they have oversimplified, as Shaw 1975 does by saying ceremonial applies to things and ceremonious to people and things. As we shall see, both adjectives are applied to persons and to things. Without trying to discuss and exemplify all the distinctions of meaning that dictionaries show, let us indicate the general tendencies of the two words. We will do this by revising Campbell's distinction somewhat. Ceremonious tends to be used in a way that suggests behavior while ceremonial tends to be used so as to suggest compliance or involvement with a ritual, which may be civil or personal as well as religious. This distinction is perhaps easiest to see in the application of the words to people: • A large percent of the poultry products in the large cities must be ceremonially butchered. It is a matter of record that many of these ceremonial butchers... —Thurman W. Arnold, The Bottlenecks of Business, 1940 • He was not a very ceremonious beau; he never sent her flowers or whispered silly things in her ear — Louis Auchincloss, Atlantic, December 1949 The same distinction can be seen when the words are applied to a person's speech: • He read in a synthetic ceremonial tone of voice that sounded preposterous as well as insincere, but he was conducting the marriage ceremony precisely as he had conducted countless previous ones —James T. Farrell, What Time Collects, 1964 • ... his ceremonious diction wore the aspect of pomposity —Sir Winston Churchill, Maxims and Reflections, 1949 As generally applied, ceremonial tends to be the everyday adjective relating to any kind of ceremony, religious or otherwise: • True ceremonial centers sprang up all over central and north-central Peru —Edward P. Lanning, Peru Before the Incas, 1967 • ... the ceremonial role of flowers at weddings and funerals —Genevieve Stuttaford, Publishers Weekly, 6 Sept. 1976 • ... an Administration which seems to conceive its role as a ceremonial one —Haynes Johnson, The Progressive, December 1969 • On ceremonial occasions, such as my grandfather's birthday or Christmas —Osbert Lancaster, All Done from Memory, 1953 Ceremonious tends to emphasize actions and behavior: • ... just as a priest kneels before an altar piled with oranges and bread and performs some ceremonious hand flourishes —Robert Craft, Stravinsky, 1972 • ... the cold and ceremonious politeness of her curtsey and address to his friend —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813 • ... the ceremonious extinguishing of the candles — Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia, 1934 • ... love's perfection is what in more ceremonious days was called rapture or bliss —George P. Elliott, Harper's, September 1970 • ... wrapped in a ceremonious and almost awkward reserve —Norman Douglas, Siren Land, 1911 • He left her on her doorstep with a ceremonious little bow —Louis Auchincloss, A Law for the Lion, 1953 Ceremonious is sometimes used to emphasize the meaninglessness of the ritual performed: • The cold bath that he took each morning was ceremonious—it was sometimes nothing else since he almost never used soap —John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957 • "Most standardized tests are by and large ceremonious," charged Edys Quellmalz of the Center for the Study of Evaluation —Council-Grams, September 1982 In broad terms, then, ceremonious tends to stress a way of acting, doing, or behaving while ceremonial serves as the simple adjective for ceremony. This example shows typical uses in successive sentences: • The Zuni are a ceremonious people, a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues. Their interest is centred upon their rich and complex ceremonial life —Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934 The broad generalizations are attended, however, with a couple of complications. First we have instances in which perhaps either word might have been chosen, and some people would no doubt have chosen the one that the author did not: • ... Owner Fleitz marched off with the three-foot silver trophy, after a ceremonious ducking in the refuse-filled Almendares River —Time, 9 Dec. 1946 • Napoleon rarely appeared in public When he did emerge, it was in a ceremonial manner, with an escort of six dogs —George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1945 The second complication is frequency of use. Our files show ceremonial to be used more often than ceremonious. The Brown Corpus statistics in Kucera & Francis 1967 tend to confirm our own numbers. Ceremonial seems to have reclaimed the territory where Campbell saw conflicting usage in the 18th century. It may possibly be spreading into areas where ceremonious would ordinarily have been used until recently. Only time will tell. You, in the meantime, will be perfectly safe if your usage is in general accord with the broad outlines of use described and illustrated here. |
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