| 词组 | collide |
| 释义 | collide It is a tradition for newspaper editors—or at least those who write usage books—to believe that collide can only be used when both objects in the encounter are moving. The notion can be found in Bryson 1984, who probably got it from Bernstein 1958, 1965, or 1977, or from various Winners & Sinners going back at least to 1955, and Bernstein may well have gotten it from G. M. Hyde's Handbook for Newspaper Workers (1926). Hyde may have picked it up from William Cullen Bryant; collided appears without explanation in his Index Expurgatorius, compiled during his years as a newspaper editor in New York and first published in 1877. The OED notes that when collide came to be used of train and ship accidents the usage was widely disparaged as an Americanism. Scheie de Vere, Americanisms (1872), is aware of this criticism, but says collide is a good English word. (He also says the British prefer to collision, a verb not attested in the OED.) Scheie de Vere includes the notion of two bodies in motion in his definition of the word. Where he got the notion is uncertain; it is not implicit in the etymology of the word, and most 19th-century dictionaries contented themselves with minor variations on Samuel Johnson's 1755 definition (intended originally as a transitive), which did not include it. There seems to be little historical basis for the insistence; the OED shows a citation from 1746 in which blood collides with the aorta wall. Our citations for the literal sense of collide that come from sources other than newspaper accounts of plane, train, ship, or automobile accidents show that it is usually celestial objects, particles, vehicles, and people that tend to collide. In some instances—as with celestial objects and particles—it is clear that all bodies are in motion. In some instances it is not clear, and in others one object appears to be stationary. Here are two examples of the last type: • ... short time it took Mr. Phelps to dodge inside the library, skid into the librarian, upset a stack of books, wreck a fernery and collide with The Mudhen at a table —Boy's Life, March 1953 • The hawk turned and stooped, only to collide with some bushes under which the duck had managed to find shelter —Edward A. Armstrong, Bird Display and Behaviour, 2d ed., 1947 By far the greatest number of our citations for collide are figurative, in which ideologies, politicians, nations, searing glances, and the like collide. In these uses relative motion is not a consideration. We thus suspect that you will seldom have to worry about this matter. If you do, you may be assured that collide is standard, even when only one body is in motion. |
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