| 词组 | party |
| 释义 | party Copperud 1980 informs us that the use of party in the sense of "person" "comes from the jargon of the telephone service." In fact, the earliest complaint about this usage we are aware of comes from Dean Alford in 1866, ten years before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. And the OED shows that the usage itself has been around since the 15th century. (The legal use of party goes back almost 200 more years.) Einstein 1985 similarly assures us that party was alive in the 17th century but fell into disuse and was reborn in the U.S. in the 1930s when many telephone subscribers had party lines. But if it was in disuse until the 1930s, why do we have commentators writing about the usage in 1866, 1869, 1870, 1873, 1878, 1881, 1906, and 1909? The telephone may have had some influence, though even that is doubtful, but it cannot have been the principal source of this use. What, then, is all the fuss about? In a word: class. The most penetrating analysis seems to have been made by Fitzedward Hall back in the 1870s. Party for person was apparently in common and serious use in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Hall seems to imply that its use went into decline—perhaps in the 18th and early 19th centuries, although he has evidence from both periods— and when it revived it became common in the speech of the uneducated, the vulgar, the unwashed. In the United States it was associated (by such commentators as Richard Grant White 1870) with the speech of shopkeepers and tradesmen. The usage was one of those held to distinguish the socially superior from the socially inferior. From our vantage point it is hard to tell if there really was a decline in ordinary use that made its appearance in the mouths of the vulgar more striking. The OED has enough 18th- and 19th-century examples to suggest that there was no decline in use; perhaps it was simply an increase in use by the less cultured that led editor Murray to add (as of 1905) "now shoppy, vulgar, or jocular." Such evidence as we have suggests that ordinary use continued until at least the middle of the 19th century: • "I know he must have exerted himself very much, for I know the parties he had to move " —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814 • Now I would give a trifle to know, historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party — Charles Lamb, "All Fools' Day," Essays of Elia, 1823 • ... my travelling companions were very disagreeable individuals; these parties being a pair of squalid females and two equally unwelcome personages of the male sex —William Cullen Bryant, Letters of a Traveller, 1850 We are doubtful that ordinary use ever disappeared: • ... evidently recognizing in me a representative of the ancient parties he once so cunningly ruined — John Burroughs, Wake-Robin, 1871 • ... he is a shameless and determined old party — Winston Churchill, The Crisis, 1901 • "Oh!" said the other party, while Densher said nothing —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 1902 The vulgar use that was objected to is probably exemplified by DeMorgan's apparently provincial Englishman and Flann O'Brien's garrulous Irishmen: • ... he thought he could ackomerdate him at that too. Anyhow, he knew a party as could! —William DeMorgan, Joseph Vance, 1906 Now be damned but hadn't they a man in the tent there from the county Cork, a bloody dandy at the long jump, a man that had a name, a man that was known in the whole country. A party by the name of • Bagenal, the champion of all Ireland —Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939 • The brother gave a promise to a certain party not to leave town during the emergency —Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien), The Best of Myles, 1968 Alford 1866 was the first to censure this use in England (the good dean was a bit embarrassed by earlier use of the word in the Apocrypha and in Shakespeare) and Richard Grant White 1870 was the first in the U.S. It received frequent mention in subsequent 19th-century sources and in early 20th-century sources. It got into newspaper tradition through William Cullen Bryant's Index Expurgatorius compiled before 1877 for the New York Evening Post (he was unmindful of his own earlier use) and the contemporaneous "Don't List" of the New York Herald. It was warned against in reference books (we have noted the OED) and books on business correspondence (Whipple 1924, Powell 1925) and college handbooks (Ball 1923, Century Collegiate Handbook 1924). It can still be found in such sources. The phone company did not come in for mention until after World War II. Our earliest example is Nicholson 1957; she specifically excuses telephone company use. Telephone company use—"your party is on the line," for instance—has, in fact, never been in question. It seems to have served only to buttress the ruminations of those commentators disinclined to look at the OED. Nor has legal use—whence this use seems to have sprung some 500 years ago—ever been questioned. What about current use? The "jocular" use mentioned by the OED has clearly flourished; it is quite common in light, breezy writing and is applied especially to persons who have reached a certain age: • The matriarch is Ma Jukes, a friendly old party — Frank Sullivan, A Rock in Every Snowball, 1946 • The Museum owns a photograph of an old party with a walrus mustache playing it —Robert Evett, Smithsonian, August 1970 • ... a six-foot, erect, florid party in his early eighties —Audax Minor, New Yorker, 17 July 1971 • I, a respectable middle-aged party with long, tidy hair in a bun and a black dinner dress —Nika Hazel-ton, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 11 Mar. 1973 • Author Singer, a bossy old party of 79 —Brad Darrach, People, 12 Dec. 1983 It is used in more serious contexts when it clearly means "one of the persons involved": • ... suggested that all three parties involved undergo psychological examinations —Eileen Hughes, Ladies' Home Jour., September 1971 • ... a reversal of traditional roles ... ; and An American Romance is one of the first novels to treat the complexities of such changing social patterns without demeaning either party —David Bellamy, Saturday Rev., 29 Apr. 1978 • ... directed at all the participants in the conversation—the addressees and third parties alike —Herbert H. Clark & Thomas B. Carlson, Language, June 1982 • ... argues that their authors are merely reminding themselves of what they know already, rather than recreating it for a third party —Philip Larkin, Required Writing, 1983 In summary, the strictures on party in the sense of "person" are a 19th-century social commentary that has carried into the latter part of the 20th century purely by inertia. The use by the uneducated that occasioned the issue no longer seems to be a matter of comment among those who play the game of identifying social status by lexical item. Perhaps there never was very much to the issue. At any rate, the phone company is not to blame. Current use is as we have shown it and is completely standard. |
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