| 词组 | chaise lounge, chaise longue |
| 释义 | chaise lounge, chaise longue Chaise-longue is a French word that was brought into English around 1800. It designated a kind of elongated chair, and the word probably followed the piece of furniture to England. Chaise lounge is formed from the French word by a process known as folk etymology. In folk etymology, words or word elements are transformed in such a way as to make them closer to more familiar or better understood words or word elements. In the case of chaise longue, longue is not an English word, but lounge, spelled with the same letters, is. In addition, there was in 19th-century American use a noun lounge that designated a similar piece of furniture (this lounge appears in Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance). It would seem, then, that the French chaise longue became combined with the American lounge to produce chaise lounge. Of course things are not quite that simple. Chaise-longue (it seems to have been regularly hyphenated during the 19th century) seems not to have been entered in an English dictionary until it appeared in a section of the OED in 1889. It did not appear in one of our dictionaries until Webster 1909. In both the OED and Webster 1909 it was marked with double bars, indicating that the editors considered it a foreign word. (Editors of Webster's Second 1934 removed the bars.) The OED mentions that Ogilvie's dictionary enters the word in the form chaise-lounge, a spelling not recognized in the OED, all of whose citations were for the French spelling. The Ogilvie's dictionary referred to turns out to be the 1855 Supplement to The Imperial Dictionary, edited by John Ogilvie and published in Edinburgh and London. Chaise-lounge is so marked that we know Ogilvie intended the second part to be pronounced like English lounge. That he entered the term suggests that it was probably current in Edinburgh at the time he was editing the supplement. Unfortunately he gives us no citation of its use in print. The American chaise lounge began to appear in print in the 1920s; undoubtedly it had been used in speech for some time earlier. As a printed term it seems to have become established first in the trade; many of our early citations are from manufacturers' catalogs and newspaper advertisements. When the spelling began to appear in both the Montgomery Ward and the Sears and Roebuck catalogs, it could no longer be ignored—millions of people would be familiar with it. Chaise lounge did have some general and literary use too, but the bulk of such use belonged to the French spelling. The current situation is not much different. Chaise lounge is still most common in commercial use. It also continues in general and literary use to some extent, but there chaise longue predominates. The latter is usual in British use of all kinds. In current American use chaise lounge is most often used for poolside, patio, or deck furniture, while chaise longue and the shortened chaise are somewhat more often used for indoor furniture. • In California we would lie on a chaise lounge ... on the patio —Donald Charles, Sky and Telescope, December 1983 • ... chairs, chaise longues and ottomans slipcovered in Thai cotton —Anthony Haden-Guest, Architectural Digest, November 1985 • A custom-made leather chaise opposite the television —Susannah Masten, Southern Accents, July/ August 1984 |
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