| 词组 | classic, classical |
| 释义 | classic, classical These two adjectives began life as variants in the early 17th century, and it is not surprising that they share several senses. But over the course of three centuries some differentiation has occurred, so that classic is the usual choice in some situations and classical in others. Usage writers have often noted this differentiation, but many of them tend to believe differentiation complete where it is not and others bog themselves down in trying to define the terms—for definitions we suggest you look in a good desk dictionary. Classic is used in preference to classical in two rather recently established applications that usage writers tend to disparage rather than to recognize—sports and fashion: • The five classic races are ... —The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games, ed. John Arlott, 1975 • ... has learned to box in classic, upright form — Michael Shapiro, Sport, July 1983 • ... the classic pure jump-shooting guard —Bruce Newman, Sports Illustrated, 20 Nov. 1985 • ... these classic khaki trousers are the best — Banana Republic Catalog, Summer 1984 • ... clothes rendered in extremely classic ways — Carrie Donovan, N. Y. Times Mag., 29 Aug. 1982 Classical is the scientific choice: • According to classical electrodynamics, the electrons should radiate energy continually —Dietrick E. Thomsen, Science News, 11 Jan. 1986 • ... Pavlovian conditioning—also known as classical conditioning —Gerald Jonas, New Yorker, 26 Aug. 1972 • ... the classical canonical forms of matrices —John Duncan, British Book News, October 1971 Classical is also usual in music: • His training was mainly in classical music, and for a time he was a member of an amateur operatic group —Current Biography, July 1965 • ... have recorded everything baroque from Albinoni to Zelenka but have rarely invaded the classical period —Stephen Wadsworth, Saturday Rev., November 1980 • The records were mostly classical, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, stacks of them —Daphne du Maurier, Ladies' Home Jour., September 1971 In reference to the language, art, and civilization of the ancient Greeks and Romans, classical is usual but classic is not unknown: • Where English designers ... had interpreted Classical decorative elements ... Napoleon wanted to follow, as closely as possible, true Greek and Roman forms —William C. Ketchum, Jr., Antique Monthly, October 1981 • ... won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge —Current Biography, December 1965 • ... the transition from the stiffer archaic style to the freer classical period —James A. Blachowicz, N. Y. Times, 21 Feb. 1983 • But no one will ever again present a "criticism of life" in classic Greek —Barnard 1979 • ... from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere —William Faulkner, 30 May 1957, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 In the senses of "serving as a standard of excellence," "memorable," and "typical," classic is more commonly used and is the form prescribed by most usage writers, but in fact classical is also used quite frequently: • Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation —Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 1975 • ... I knew that long before his father's time the buffalo had found their classic habitat on the Great Plains —Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, 1980 • The manually operated elevators were frequently out of action; when not, the call buttons had the classic Bellevue notice affixed: "Ring Up for Down." — Gerald Weissman, The Woods Hole Cantata, 1975 • It was just a classic error, that's all, not getting residuals —Charles Adams, quoted in Washington Post, 17 Nov. 1982 • He was a classic sales go-getter —William Oscar Johnson, Sports Illustrated, 20 Sept. 1982 • The Orioles won the thing in the eighth, in equally classical style —Roger Angell, New Yorker, 1 May 1984 • It was a kind of classical exhibition of Georgia politics —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 21 July 1962 • ... would be one response to such a classical Oedipal situation —Norman MacKenzie, The Listener, 25 April 1974 |
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