| 词组 | choice |
| 释义 | choice I The origin of some notions about usage is as mysterious as the origin of many folk beliefs. A correspondent in Safire 1984 says that he often sees, "He has two choices, either A or B." "Of course," the correspondent goes on, "there is only one choice." This correspondent's belief, which seems to rest on the notion that choice has but a single meaning, is of very obscure origin, unless the correspondent himself thought it up. We have been unable to find such a concern expressed in our collection of usage books, perhaps because many of them offer choice as a word to be used in place of alternative: • To the purist one should never speak of three alternatives, rather of three "choices" —Harper 1985 Choice, however, has several senses, and the one being objected to by Safire's correspondent is the same sense used in the compound adjective multiple-choice, which is used of tests. While it is not the most common sense of choice, it is by no means rare: • A single light in a computer can only be in one of two states, on or off; it thus expresses a two-choice situation —Robert W. Marks, The New Mathematics Dictionary and Handbook, 1964 You can use this sense if you need to. It is standard. II This adjective is used by a few grammarians—George O. Curme and Paul Roberts, for instance—to describe the most careful and conservative kind of English. It is probably a better descriptor of that kind of English than is formal, which is the term used by most commentators but which is confusingly applied to different ranges of written material by different commentators. See also formal. |
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