| 词组 | contemporary |
| 释义 | contemporary Back in the 1960s Theodore Bernstein was denouncing in Winners & Sinners uses of contemporary in the sense "present-day, modern" that he had observed in the New York Times. He may, in part, have condemned the sense because he could not find it in his Webster's Second. Gowers in Fowler 1965 has a similar problem: he cannot find the meaning in the OED. Webster's Second might well have served Mr. Bernstein better. Evidence in the OED Supplement and our own files shows that our editors simply missed the meaning. The oldest Supplement citation is the title of The Contemporary Review, which goes back to 1866. That title was known to the editors of Webster's Second, as was Contemporary American Literature, the title of a book from which citations for the dictionary were taken. And the use existed in other books marked for citations. For instance, here is George Bernard Shaw using the word in a way that illustrates the transition from "existing at the same time" to "present-day": • In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of our contemporary English drama —preface, Man and Superman, 1903 A little later in the same preface Shaw uses the word in the new sense: • ... what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real... These passages had been marked by our editors for other words than contemporary, as had this one: • ... very high in the waist, very full and long in the skirt; a frock that was at once old-fashioned and tremendously contemporary —Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves, 1925 So our editors missed the sense and thereby contributed to the creation of a usage issue. The new sense had become fully established by the late 1940s: • ... and put them into a novel that is clamorously contemporary —John William Rogers, Saturday Rev., 17 July 1948 • Their aim was to bring poetry closer to its real self and to make it more vivid, more intense and more contemporary —Maurice Bowra, New Republic, 25 Nov. 1946 • The first of these, characteristic of the 1920's, was known to its adepts as Contemporary Music —Virgil Thomson, The Musical Scene, 1947 • ... whose work is quite as contemporary as that of Austin Clarke even if he is no longer among the living—Babette Deutsch, New Republic, 21 Mar. 1949 Since this meaning is to be found in all recent American dictionaries as well as the OED Supplement, and is even part ofthe title of Evans 1957 and Harper 1975, 1985, you can assume that it is entirely standard. The establishment of the "present-day" sense has led to two other issues mentioned in some usage books. The first is a warning—in Cook 1985 and a couple of others—about the likelihood of ambiguity in sentences like this: • ... but no one would consider Byron's poetry licentious by contemporary standards —N.Y. Times, 7 May 1968 The argument is that contemporary might refer either to Byron's time or to the present. While the possibility of ambiguity does exist, it seems remote unless the context has been deliberately removed. Even in the New York Times excerpt (cited in an issue of Winners & Sinners), the intent is made quite plain by "would consider"; if the writer had meant to refer to Byron's time the verb probably would have been "considered" or "would have considered." It is not very likely that a reader will be misled with the complete context to read. Einstein 1985 recommends the use of contemporaneous for "existing at the same time" if the use of contemporary might cause confusion. Contemporary and contemporaneous have been synonymous since the 17th century. For many years the synonymy discriminations in Merriam-Webster dictionaries noted that contemporary was likely to be applied to people and contemporaneous to events. This distinction was only broadly true; contemporaneous was less frequently applied to people than contemporary and more often to things or events. But the development of the newer sense of contemporary has altered the relationship between the two words. Since the late 1940s the "modern, present-day" meaning of contemporary has become its predominant use. Contemporaneous, in spite of two or three false starts in the direction of contemporary, has essentially retained its original sense. What we are beginning to see is what H. W. Fowler called "differentiation": contemporary is being used chiefly in its most recent sense, and contemporaneous is being used for "existing at the same time"—more or less replacing contemporary in that sense. While this differentiation is not complete, it does permit writers to contrast the two words in a single sentence: • But now that we have not merely contemporary but almost contemporaneous history, putting events in their place almost as they roll off the production line — Times Literary Supp., 9 Jan. 1964 • The world of the Jews in Germany, France, England, Holland, Italy, Austria, was vastly different from the world of shtetl Jews in eastern Europe. The world of the first was contemporary; the world of the second only contemporaneous —Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish, 1968 So the "present-day, modern" sense of contemporary has become fully established, and contemporaneous appears to be replacing contemporary in its older sense. You will be able to observe whether this differentiation develops so completely that the sense Bernstein and Fol-lett and Gowers thought to be the only correct one actually becomes old-fashioned. Do not expect the result to be too tidy, however; a countervailing force exists in the noun contemporary, for which the older meaning remains in vigorous use. |
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