| 词组 | chaff, chafe |
| 释义 | chaff, chafe Copperud 1970, 1980 and Bryson 1984 warn against confusing chaff with chafe. Since, in the senses cited, chaff means "to tease good-naturedly" and chafe "to irritate, vex," you might well wonder how the words could be confused. Copperud gives us an example: "The mayor was chaffing at his confinement...." The example makes things clearer—this is an intransitive sense we are dealing with, not the transitive ones cited. And, in fact, this problem does not involve the 19th-century verb chaff that means "tease, banter" at all. It appears from evidence in the OED that back in the bad old days before printers—and schoolmasters in their wake—had normalized English spelling, the verb we now know as chafe was also spelled chaff, among many other ways. We can find this double –f spelling in Caxton, Sterne, and others. The OED says the spelling was fairly common from the 16th to the 19th century, and Webster's Third lists it as an archaic variant. The sense of chafe in which the chaff spelling seems to turn up occasionally is the one that means "to feel or show irritation or discontent." Here are a couple of examples of it in the usual spelling: • There are scientists, however, who chafe at such restrictions—Otto Friedrich, Time, 10 Sept. 1984 • ... who for years has chafed under the burden of a WASP culture —Alfred Kazin, Atlantic, January 1983 Here are three examples with the double –f spelling: • At that time the German army was chaffing under conservative policies of the old-line generals —Common weal, 16 Feb. 1940 • With much of Europe chaffing under the growing U.S. economic domination —Charles A. Wells, Between the Lines, 1 Jan. 1967 • ... and he is chaffing today because of the 26 per cent service charge on his hotel bill —Robert Craft, Stravinsky, 1972 These occasional occurrences—we have only three to dozens and dozens of chafe—suggest that the old spelling is still used once in a great while, that it is not so much archaic as just quite rare. You can use it, if it looks and sounds right to you, but do so with the knowledge that it is rare and is likely to be thought a misspelling or a confusion. |
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