| 词组 | condemn, contemn |
| 释义 | condemn, contemn Two or three commentators warn us not to confuse condemn and contemn. Likely no one has any trouble with condemn; the problem is contemn, which is a rather bookish word and is not much used. Your dictionary defines contemn as "to view or treat with contempt; scorn." Keep the definition in mind as you read the examples. The real difficulty seems to be that a writer who chooses contemn instead of scorn, sneer at, or despise runs a certain risk of being thought to have spelled condemn wrong or to have otherwise been mistaken, when the context does not rule out the sense of condemn. We have no examples of confusion in our files, but we do have examples in which a reader unfamiliar with this relatively rare word could easily read condemn for contemn. Look at these examples: • Scandal besmirched the officeholders; the ballot box, corrupted, no longer recorded the voice of the people; and the law, contemned, exercised no restraint over criminals —Oscar Handlin, The American People in the Twentieth Century, 1954 • Historically, the word vulgar was used in fairly neutral description up to the last quarter of the seventeenth century to mean and describe the common people. Vulgar was common but not yet contemned —Aristides, American Scholar, Winter 1981-1982 • The priestly function transcended the individual, and an unworthy priest was contemned, not for performing service when unfit to do so, but for neglecting to do it at all —James A. Williamson, The Tudor Age, 1964 • ... his own early drawings of moss-roses and picturesque castles—things that he now mercilessly contemned —Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale, 1908 • So long as the aspirations of surrealism are granted any validity—and even those who have contemned its visual art have not hesitated to admit the worth of its literary products —David Sylvester, Encounter, September 1954 • Much of the out-of-state press, with which Wallace had carried on a running feud for years, contemned Mrs. Wallace's candidacy —Current Biography, September 1967 In how many of these examples might the unwary reader read condemn? It is not very likely in the first two but not impossible or even improbable in the rest. So the real problem, we think, is not that writers confuse the two words, but that some readers may mistake contemn as condemn. |
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