| 词组 | orchestrate |
| 释义 | orchestrate Figurative use of the word orchestrate has drawn criticism from language commentators on the grounds that it is faddish or a cliché, or that its figurative use has strayed too far from the original musical sense. However, if use of the figurative sense, "to arrange or combine so as to achieve maximum effect," is a fad, it is a long-lived one, as this use is attested as early as 1883 and is almost as old as the literal use, which is attested only from 1880. Merriam-Webster's earliest evidence for the figurative sense comes almost exclusively from writings about painting: • ... Cottet, who combined in himself the romantic fire and feeling for orchestrated colour of Delacroix with the incisive realism ... of Courbet —Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed., 1902-1903 • Even as a symphony is in D or a sonata is in A, his pictures were orchestrated according to a tone — Arthur Jerome Eddy, Recollections and Impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler, 1903 • ... lacquers in which the cold and lovely detail of fairy-land was not so much depicted as orchestrated —James Hilton, Lost Horizon, 1933 In the late 1940s, orchestrate started gaining wider use, at first in application to literature and then to other subjects: • The rhythm and idiom of contemporary speech were orchestrated into the complex harmonies of King Lear and The Tempest —Robert Speaight, Drama Since 1939, 1947 • Their outmoded language was an expression of what was backward-glancing in his spirit. It pleased him by being out of date. It orchestrated his melancholy —John Mason Brown, Saturday Rev., 24 July 1948 • Kanin knows how to orchestrate a gag by timing it shrewdly —Brooks Atkinson, quoted in Current Biography 1953 • ... the "popular indignation" over the "affronts and insults to Spanish dignity" orchestrated ... by the Falange newspapers —Frank Gorrell, New Republic, 22 Feb. 1954 By the 1970s and 80s, figurative use of orchestrate had indeed become quite common and had begun attracting criticism from the language commentators. Clearly, however, many good writers, including the authors of these passages, think the figurative use is quite acceptable: • ... moments later he is again on the phone, while his secretary orchestrates incoming and outgoing calls —John McPhee, New Yorker, 11 Sept. 1971 • A few days later, in orchestrated pursuance of a policy to suppress criticism of seven weeks of appeasement —William Safire, N.Y. Times, 21 Dec. 1979 • People are positioned; looks are orchestrated; gestures are timed —Stanley Kauffmann, Before My Eyes, 1980 • Any break at a line, any caesura, any surfacing of a natural syllable intonation—these are all a total of language-feel that the writer orchestrates according to what comes along in the act of composing —William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl, 1978 |
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