| 词组 | personal |
| 释义 | personal 1. Personal is a word of frequent occurrence. While the critics will allow it to be occasionally useful, they generally tend to disparage its use as redundant or unnecessary, especially in the expressions personal friend, personal opinion, and personal physician. They are vague, if not downright silent, about where they find these uses. Do they find them in speech? • ... a criticism is after all a personal opinion, and any personal opinion on any work is valid because the work itself is only the writer's personal opinion on a situation —William Faulkner, 1 May 1958, in Faulkner in the University, 1959 If such uses are common in speech, our files have few instances of the criticized combinations from edited prose. Personal friend might be useful, suggests one critic, if there were reason to distinguish business from professional friendship: • If you ask the personal friends and associates of... —Ladies' Home Jour., October 1971 The two or three critics who sniff at personal physician miss the point: the phrase is used of the rich and powerful, who can afford to keep a physician available to them at need. The middle-class or poor person has no personal physician. • One of his ancestors ... was the personal physician of Napoleon Bonaparte's brother —Current Biography, July 1965 A few critics will allow personal to be useful in emphasizing privacy or one's private life or possessions: • ... an interesting minor poet whose personal story was deeply poignant —Irving Howe, Harper's, January 1972 • He doesn't believe in talking about himself; ... he thinks the personal side of his life is very much his —David Halberstam, McCall's, November 1971 • The Rachmaninoff No. 3 is generally considered the personal property of Vladimir Horowitz —Irving Kolodin, Saturday Rev., 13 Nov. 1976 • ... pleasure and my own personal happiness ... are all I deem worth a hoot —George Jean Nathan, Testament of a Critic, 1931 It may be used to emphasize the individual personality: • ... each practiced an extremely personal form of religious expression —Garson Kanin, Cosmopolitan, March 1972 • ... a dancer whose training and development is concentrated on the projection of a unique, personal style —Calvin Tomkins, Saturday Rev., 29 Jan. 1972 • ... neither candidate had much personal appeal — Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, 18 Nov. 1972 • She was big and strong and handsome, although without much personal force —Arlene Croce, Harper's, April 1971 It may emphasize firsthand participation: • Like every journalist, I have personal memories of Nikita Khrushchev —Timothy Foote, Harper's, November 1971 In this use it often stresses what one does oneself as opposed to what one's agents or representatives do: • ... was the personal choice of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara —Current Biography, January 1965 • ... believed in the power of diplomacy, and personal diplomacy at that —Martin Mayer, Cosmopolitan, January 1972 In short, the censured uses of personal do not seem to be especially common in edited prose; and when they do appear, authors generally have a good reason for them. We think you need not be too concerned about the critics' censures as long as you have a good reason for using personal. 2. Personal, personnel. A surprisingly large number of books warn against confusing these two words. Such confusion would appear unlikely because they are pronounced differently and function as different parts of speech. It is possible that they both may be misspelled sometimes as personel. |
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