| 词组 | perfect |
| 释义 | perfect "The phrases, more perfect, and most perfect, are improper," declared Lindley Murray in his Grammar of 1795, starting a hare that is being chased to this very day. For instance: • Perfect is viewed by many careful writers as one of the uncomparable adjectives —Harper 1985 • Perfect has traditionally been considered an absolute term—Heritage 1982 • Many people feel that since things either are or are not perfect it is illogical to speak of very perfect or more perfect—Longman 1984 Copperud 1970 reports that the consensus of his usage authorities is that perfect may be freely compared, and the dictionaries cited above agree. But some commentators do not: Bernstein 1965, 1971 favors keeping perfect free from comparison, and Simon 1980 believes that perfect can have no superlative. Here is the background of this disagreement. Evidence in the OED shows perfect, in one sense or another, has been used in the comparative and superlative since the 14th century; citations from the 14th century include Wycliffe, from the 16th Sir Thomas Elyot, Robert Greene, and Shakespeare, and from the 17th the King James Bible, Pepys, Locke, and Sir William Temple. Examples from the 18th century are numerous and include such authors as Addison, Swift, and Boling-broke and such grammarians and rhetoricians as Hugh Blair, Campbell 1776, and Lowth 1762; Lindley Murray himself copied Blair's and Campbell's uses in his own grammar of 1795. For Americans, the most important 18th-century example is the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: "in order to form a more perfect union." How did Murray and the grammarians who followed him come to believe perfect should not be compared in spite of usage? They applied rigorous logic, or so they thought. Lowth and Priestley 1798 had already seen certain adjectives as having, to use Lowth's words, "in themselves a superlative signification" to which they thought it improper or illogical to add a superlative ending, although they recognized that such in fact was done (for a complete discussion, see absolute adjectives). Lowth noticed chiefest and extremest; it was Murray who added perfect to the list. And, of course, once other grammarians (Goold Brown 1851 lists several, including Samuel Kirkham, whose book English Grammar in Familiar Lectures, 1st ed., 1823, with several subsequent editions, was rather widely used in the U.S.) had copied Murray, perfect became solidly ensconced in ever-growing lists of adjectives not to be compared. The opinions of the grammarians were repeated in handbooks, such as Ayres 1881, and thence passed on to our modern commentators. And how is it that American grammarians and usage commentators have ignored the authority of the Constitution's example? Harper 1985 says that one rebuttal to the urging of the constitutional example is the argument that the usage of 1787 is not the same as today's. The argument, though a valid enough generalization in many respects, will not hold water in this case. The OED shows 19th-century examples, including one from Leigh Hunt; Merriam-Webster files have these in addition: • ... man and the more perfect animals —John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 1843-1872 • ... made my reverie one of the perfectest things in the world —William Dean Howells, Venetian Life, enlarged ed., 1872 • Their love had been as yet too perfect —Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, 1866 • That is one reason I like reading older novels— Scott's, Miss Austen's, Miss Edgeworth's, etc.—that the English is so perfect —Lewis Carroll, letter, 10 July 1892 • ... the stronger and more perfect parts of his music —John Burroughs, Wake-Robin, 1871 Twentieth-century examples are numerous. Here are a few: • ... the perfectest herald of joy —James Branch Cabell, The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck, 1915 • ... creating a more perfect theocratic machinery — Vernon Louis Partington, Main Currents in American Thought, 1930 • I believe this passage contains the most perfect poetry yet written by any of the younger poets —C. Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry, 3d ed., 1936 • ... utilizing the machine to make the world more perfect —Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934 • ... until we get absolutely perfect knowledge —Morris R. Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal, 1946 • ... some of the most perfect examples of early Colonial and Federalist architecture —John P. Mar-quand, New England Journeys, No. 2, 1954 • ... a more perfect rake has seldom existed —Nancy Mitford, Atlantic, May 1954 • ... the most perfect writer of my generation —Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959 • ... the most perfect Puck I have ever seen —Walter Terry, N. Y. Herald Tribune, 28 Jan. 1962 • ... the owner of a most perfect nose and huge, startled eyes —Vogue, September 1976 "Perfect, if taken in its strictest sense, must not be compared"—so said Goold Brown in 1851. Only one correction is necessary: must not be should read is not. "But this word," Goold Brown continues, "like many others which mean most in the positive, is often used with a certain latitude of meaning, which renders its comparison by the adverbs not altogether inadmissible; nor is it destitute of authority." The comparison of perfect has been in respectable use from the 14th century to the present; it has never been wrong, except in the imagination of Lindley Murray and those who repeat after him. • If we say, "This is more perfect that that," we do not mean that either is perfect without limitation, but that "this" has "more" of the qualities that go to make up perfection than "that"; it is more nearly perfect. Such usage has high literary authority —Fernald 1946 |
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