| 词组 | conclave |
| 释义 | conclave It occasionally happens that a journalistic practice popular at a particular time will be unfavorably noticed by a usage commentator in a book and from that time will continue to be mentioned in usage books, even after the popularity of the practice has waned. This appears to be the case with conclave. During the 1940s and 1950s many journalists were using conclave for any gathering of a group or association; there were references to conclaves of doctors, Boy Scouts, American Legionnaires, United Nations delegates, and on and on and on. This use is a figurative extension of the word as applied to the meeting of the College of Cardinals to elect a Pope. Such figurative use is not, of course, abnormal; one sense or another of conclave has been used figuratively from the 17th century on. Theodore Bernstein denounced the journalistic use in 1965, basing his objection on the Latin etymology of the word (it is based on Latin clavis "key") and the fact that the word first designated a room. Except in specific reference to the room in which the College of Cardinals elects the Pope, this sense is obsolete. The entire development of conclave in English has occurred through the adding of extended meanings unrelated to the etymology, so the Latin origin has no bearing on current use. From the place, the word was extended to the meeting held there and to the people at the meeting. The first meetings called conclaves were meetings of ecclesiastics; later it referred to meetings of lay people, and, from about the middle of the 20th century, to meetings of lay people not necessarily held behind closed doors. We present some 20th-century examples. All are living uses of the word in English, and all are perfectly standard. • ... after a short conclave of a few hours, the cardinals unanimously elected pope the youngest among them —Philip Hughes, Popular History of the Catholic Church, 1954 • We look upon the Moscow festival as a conclave of cinema artists —George Stevens, Jr., quoted in Current Biography, December 1965 • ... the opening session of the First Annual A. J. Liebling Counter-Convention, a two-day conclave of newspaper and magazine writers —Thomas Mee-han, Saturday Rev., 3 June 1972 • The clergy met in unofficial but well-attended conclave to deliberate —Norman Douglas, South Wind, 1917 • ... to make her views known ... at high-level conclaves in the Pentagon —Marshall Smith, Cosmopolitan, July 1976 • ... bandying heterodoxies in a conclave of poets outside some little café on the Rive Gauche —Max Beerbohm, Atlantic, December 1950 • The ball was a vast conclave of seeming strangers whom, it turned out, one mostly knew —John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador's Journal, 1969 • The piece at the Broadhurst... deals with a United States delegate to a conclave of the United Nations —Wolcott Gibbs, New Yorker, 26 Dec. 1953 |
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