| 词组 | climactic, climatic |
| 释义 | climactic, climatic When nine or ten handbooks make haste to tell you that climactic relates to climax and climatic to climate and you should not confuse the two, you might suppose that there is some insidious tendency for the words to be muddled in somewhat similar contexts. Not so. This is a simple matter of spelling, and from what we can find in our files the error is more often mentioned in handbooks than it occurs in edited prose. Climactic is the rather more frequent word; it is useful to book and movie reviewers, among others. Climatic is used mostly in technical contexts, but occasionally creeps into ordinary public view in articles on ice ages and such. Our scanty evidence suggests that when the spelling or the typesetting goes wrong, it is climatic that turns up in the place of climactic. Here are two examples of each word used correctly and one of climatic for climactic. • ... this average citizen who is projected into the climactic American dream of parking his toothbrush at the White House —Maxwell Geismar, The Last of the Provincials, 1947 • ... they send a squad of gunmen to wipe him out, and in the climactic gun battle they succeed — Arthur Knight, Saturday Rev., 24 July 1971 • ... a sudden violent climatic change, as... in the ice age —W. H. Auden, Columbia Forum, Winter 1970 • ... he got a bit dotty: he extrapolated his climatic theories into a theory that superior races, evolved under just the right climatic conditions, were able to carry on this superiority as they moved into new climes —Times Literary Supp., 28 May 1971 • Not long ago, the car chase was just the climatic ingredient in movies —Peter Davalle, Annabel, March 1975 The likelihood of a typo or misspelling extends to the compound anti-climactic too. The first example is an error, the second is written as it should be. • When you reach the first-act finale ... you do not have the feeling that it is anti-climatic —Current Biography, June 1965 This example happens to occur in quoted material, so that we cannot be sure whether the error was made in the original source or in the reprinter. In this final example, in any case, all is copacetic: • The debate, however, proved anti-climactic —Norman Mailer, Harper's, November 1968 |
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