| 词组 | cheap |
| 释义 | cheap 1. Copperud 1980 warns of the derogatory connotations of cheap meaning "inexpensive," and Reader's Digest 1983 worries that the pejorative uses are driving the "inexpensive" sense out of use. The neutral sense, however, is not being driven out of use: • If there is a cheaper hobby in the world than the collection of homonyms, I have yet to find it —James J. Kilpatrick, Smithsonian, April 1984 • ... was discovering how simple and cheap the sport can be —David Butwin, Saturday Rev., 29 Jan. 1972 • The initial purposes of the public development of the St. Lawrence ... had been to supply home consumers ... with cheap power —Current Biography, May 1967 • ... a new segment of the population that wouldn't travel at all without cheap group rates —Barbara Johnson, Saturday Rev., 4 Mar. 1972 • ... at a time when every federal penny is to be watched and pinched, good basic science comes relatively cheap —Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, 1983 Pejorative senses can easily be told from the context, in most cases: • I won't tell you the brand name, but I bought it cheap, because it doesn't get used very much. And you know what I got? A cheap stove —Betty Fur-ness, quoted in Money, December 1980 • ... motivated by insatiable vanity and a desire for cheap thrills —Barbara Tritel, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 23 Feb. 1986 • Clara was wearing a gown of sequined silver. She looked cheap —E. L. Doctorow, Loon Lake, 1979 • ... a cheap array of tawdry glitter —Current Biography, May 1965 You probably need not worry about the neutral sense being taken as pejorative except when cheap is used attributively—directly ahead of the noun it modifies. In the next example cheap connotes shoddiness as well as low price: • ... a desk, good but battered ..., a bed serving also as a sofa, a cheap carpet —Janice Elliott, Angels Falling, 1969 The likelihood of the pejorative connotation creeping in is greatest when the noun denotes a physical object—no one is confused about cheap electric power or cheap travel rates. If you mean to say that an object is not expensive by using cheap, you had better take care to make your meaning unmistakable in context. 2. Bernstein 1971 reminds us that cheap is an adverb as well as cheaply. The adverb cheap is most frequently found in contexts of buying and selling, and it regularly follows the word it modifies: • ... if there is an abandoned shed in your neighborhood that you can buy cheap —Daniel B. Weems, Raising Goats, 1983 • ... the multinationals got the licences cheap —Neal Ascherson, Observer Rev., 3 Mar. 1974 • You could then launch these little spacecraft wonderfully cheap —Freeman Dyson, Science 85, November 1985 Cheaply is used in a wider range of meanings and may either precede or follow the word it modifies: • ... which diminish his capacity to produce efficiently and cheaply —Ivar Berg, Change, September 1971 • ... sell their cheaply made goods to America — Goodman Ace, Saturday Rev., 25 Mar. 1972 • ... probably the worst historical novel ever penned, and certainly the most cheaply melodramatic — Albert Guérard, Education of a Humanist, 1949 • ... real estate speculators blockbusted their West Side neighborhoods, snapping up homes cheaply — John Saar, People, 11 Apr. 1983 There are people who believe that all adverbs end in -ly and who avoid flat adverbs like cheap (see flat adverbs). It is therefore pretty common to see cheaply in a context where cheap would also have been perfectly idiomatic: • For this reason, the Lutzes get the house cheaply — Stephen King, Playboy, January 1981 The adverb cheaply sometimes replaces the adjective cheap after a copulative verb. This is a phenomenon of fairly long standing; the OED has examples of the phrase to hold cheap "to think little of—which dates from Shakespeare's time—written as to hold cheaply in the 19th century. This sort of substitution is one kind of hypercorrection. Here are a couple of more recent examples, first the adjective and then the hypercorrect adverb: • ... he needed money to acquire Old Masters, which never come cheap —Robert Wernick, Smithsonian, September 1979 • Quality, as one might expect, does not exactly come cheaply —G. Bruce Boyer, Town & Country, February 1983 |
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