| 词组 | not to worry |
| 释义 | not to worry Sixty-two percent of the Harper 1985 usage panel disapproved the harmless British import not to worry in speech and 87 percent disapproved it in writing. Panelist Willard R. Espy dissented, finding not to worry diverting. In this he agrees with Flesch 1983. The peculiarity of the expression lies in the imperative force of not to—equivalent to don't. The construction appears to be quite recent. The OED Supplement has a precursor of not to worry in "please not to mention that again" from George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), but the earliest citation they show for not to worry is from 1958. Language historian Barbara M. H. Strang in a 1965 book review refers to it as a new construction. The phrase began to appear in American English in the 1970s and is still to be found now and then: • "I don't suppose you remembered that bagel," Megan says. "Not to worry, I'm not really hungry anyway...." —Jay Mclnerney, Bright Lights, Big City, 1984 • Our hero had just gone through a divorce, of which, mercifully, his journal says little directly; but, not to worry, there is sufficient dolorosity to go round — Aristides, American Scholar, Winter 1985/86 The construction turns up once in a while with other verbs: • "We're gonna go outside for a while, okay?" she said. "Not to panic or anything. But I have this freaky feeling."—Cyra McFadden, The Serial, 1977 |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。