| 词组 | passel |
| 释义 | passel Harper 1985 finds passel a useful and colorful word while Nickles 1974 denigrates it as a cracker-barrel term that should be avoided. With opinion thus divided, you can do as you please. Harper does warn against its use in formal contexts; our evidence shows it not used in highly formal situations. Passel is by origin a pronunciation spelling of a dialectal pronunciation of parcel. In its current manifestation it is primarily an Americanism, but it exists both as a pronunciation and a spelling in British dialects too, and as a pronunciation spelling it can be found as long ago as the Paston letters of the middle 15th century. Passel seems to have been fairly common in 19th-cen-tury American humor and fiction, mostly of the local-color variety, and occasionally popped up in British writing (at least once in Kipling, for instance). It began to creep into more general use in the 20th century. It got its biggest boost in the 1940s when such popular weekly magazines as Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Review began using it. It continues to have wide nonregional use in similar publications. A few examples: • In a passel of trees —Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel, 1920 • ... returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the Federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads —James Thurber, "The Night the Bed Fell," from My Life and Hard Times, 1933 • A passel of authors on the hoof —Bennett Cerf, Saturday Rev., 5 Nov. 1949 • ... the passel of plain good folk with whom there is nothing wrong that a little extra brain and taste could not cure —John Simon, New York, 15 Feb. 1971 • ... I've met up with an unusually large passel of geese this year —Jean Stafford, New Yorker, 3 Dec. 1973 • ... Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx and a passel of other post-16th century thinkers —Ezra Bowen, Time, 6 May 1985 Although passel is most often used with count nouns, it is also used occasionally with mass nouns: • ... it was quite a passel of legal tender —Dan Parker, The ABC of Horse Racing, 1947 • ... Alaskans, who want to make a passel of money tapping their natural resources —Jon Margolis, Esquire, March 1970 |
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