| 词组 | craft |
| 释义 | craft 1. The editors of Harper 1985 asked their usage panel about craft used as a verb by President Reagan in "the wisdom to craft a system of government" Sixty-nine percent of the panel turned thumbs down on the use, but panelist James J. Kilpatrick saw nothing wrong with it. Bernstein 1965 seems to have been the first to notice the verb; he identifies the use of the past participle in advertising. The OED has a single 15th-century example of craft used as a transitive verb, so the 20th-century use is a sort of revival. It does seem to have started in advertising, chiefly as a past participle, shortly after World War II: • Which means they're more than wonderfully smart and exquisitely crafted —advt., Life, 16 Sept. 1946 • Crafted with the great beauty and care that make every ... shoe a masterpiece in footwear —advt., Harper's Bazaar, October 1947 • Crafted in fine mahoganies and choice, hand-rubbed mahogany veneers —advt., N. Y. Herald Tribune, 15 July 1951 The intention is to suggest the workmanship and skill of master craftsmen. The revival was not long in reaching more general contexts: • Even the beautifully crafted mosaics on the walls were dingy —Lloyd C. Douglas, The Big Fisherman, 1948 • ... meticulous 1/8-scale models he has crafted — Newsweek, 9 Feb 1953 • There are ten stories in the collection, most of them superbly crafted —Ann F. Wolfe, Saturday Rev., 3 Sept. 1955 Recent use has followed the same general lines. Craft and crafted are used literally: • ... showing aborigines crafting boomerangs with Stone-Age techniques —Smithsonian, August 1970 • Indian artisans crafted the idol before Columbus discovered the New World —National Geographic School Bulletin, 18 Jan. 1971 • ... one of the most sophisticated and highly evolved machines that man has yet crafted —David F. Salisbury, Christian Science Monitor, 9 Oct. 1979 More frequently, though, they are found in figurative use, very often referring to writing: • The beautifully crafted intricacy of plot forbids brief summary —Edmund Fuller, Chicago Tribune Mag. of Books, 26 May 1963 • ... ballets give the observer the illusion of spontaneous and self-created emotional events rather than crafted choreography —Current Biography, October 1971 • ... it's a carefully crafted poem —Robert Weaver, Books in Canada, January 1972 • ... fifty guidelines for crafting a sales pitch —Walter McQuade, Fortune, 21 Apr. 1980 • The novel deal was crafted to avoid restrictions in federal law —Business Week, 2 Mar. 1981 • ... offering bribes to venal literary editors, crafting ecstatic reviews of each other's books —Martin Amis, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 5 Apr. 1981 • There are those in the current White House who spend all their time crafting the President's image — Alexander M. Haig, Jr., TV Guide, 15 Mar. 1985 The President, or his speech writer, is miles ahead of most of the Harper usage panel. Craft, both as verb and participial adjective, is well established in current American use. It has also been used in British English. 2. A few commentators remind us that when the noun craft means boat, aircraft, or spacecraft, the plural is usually the uninflected plural craft, although crafts is sometimes also used. This information is in your dictionary. 3. Craft, kraft. A few people unfamiliar with the word think that kraft, the kind of paper your brown supermarket bag is made of, is spelled craft. It is not; use k for this paper. 4. crass Crass is an adjective that writers have no difficulty in using but dictionaries seem unable to define. And if dictionaries are muddled, you can imagine the condition of the few usage writers who venture to say that it is often misused. Bernstein 1965 seems to have begun the discussion. He was under the impression that the basic meaning of crass is "stupid," a view which is not sustained by the evidence. Little wonder, then, that he found fault with two uses where the word pretty clearly did not mean "stupid." Copperud 1970 interprets Bernstein's examples to be using the word to mean "cheap, mercenary, greedy"; Copperud's interpretation is possible in some contexts, and undoubtedly some people do use the word in this way. His interpretation seems to fit one of Bernstein's examples, which refers to "the bit of insurance a crass employer paid," but other interpretations of that phrase are also possible. It seems likely that Copperud brought this meaning to the example rather than deriving the meaning from the example. Bryson 1984 is somewhat more cautious, saying that crass does not mean "merely coarse or tasteless." Of these commentators only Bernstein provides real examples; none has a very certain idea of what crass means. But let's not be too hard on our commentators. Once they were launched upon this issue, they had to depend on dictionaries for guidance, and the dictionaries failed them. The problem for the lexicographer is this: crass is a word of wide application and little specific content. It is always unflattering and usually pejorative. It is a handy word for condemnation. But its meaning tends to be colored by the associations of the word it modifies. Perhaps the easiest place to begin an examination of crass is at the beginning. It was dragged into English from Latin; the Latin original meant "thick, gross." Its earliest use in English was to describe physical entities. This use is now virtually archaic. The word was used to distinguish what was thick, coarse, heavy from what was thin, delicate, light. Such use may still turn up on rare occasions: • Crass vultures and hawks fly with delicate finches, hummingbirds and doves —Nancy Lyon, N.Y. Times, 4 Mar. 1973 But crass is now used almost entirely in figurative applications. In such use it is overwhelmingly negative; it regularly emphasizes the lack of some desirable characteristic. Quite often the missing characteristic is delicacy of feeling, sensitivity, or consideration: • To a crass world it does appear extraordinary that two beings who need each other desperately, and who do not know how soon they may be wrenched apart, should treasure every golden moment —Mary Webb, The Golden Arrow, 1916 • ... whereas we ourselves live in an Age of Anxiety, our progenitors were often distinguished by their crass complacency —Peter Quennell, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 11 July 1954 • Nobody on Wall Street would be so crass as to use the word "enormous"; the preferred expression is "a reasonable profit commensurate with the risk." — Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's, May 1971 • ... despite the same crass reliance on methods of intimidation —Anthony Bailey, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 6 May 1973 • The crass, expedient handling of the French underground —Hanson W. Baldwin, Saturday Rev., 6 Mar. 1976 It may suggest a lack of subtlety or discrimination, or an inability to discriminate or to appreciate subtlety: • ... in deep disgust at the farrier's crass incompetence to apprehend the conditions of ghostly phenomena —George Eliot, Silas Marner, 1861 • ... misconceived literature in the crassest possible way —Alfred Kazin, Saturday Rev., 3 May 1975 • ... a phrase far too grand to designate the crass traditional views of nature which prevailed —Henry O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, 4th ed., 1925 • Among yachtsmen, the distinction between big and little boats is a matter of clubby politesse For insurance purposes, the distinction is much crasser but just as blurred —Eugene Sullivan, Money, July 1973 Sometimes crass suggests that what it is applied to should be beneath one: • ... a culture daintily remote from the crass concerns of everyday life —Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change, 1952 • ... returning from the Holy Land to find his friends taken up with the small and crass details of a commerce that he had never learned —Louis Auchin-closs, A Law for the Lion, 1953 • Her anxieties for her children's future, which were considered crass and reactionary by Tolstoy's followers —Katha Pollitt, Saturday Rev., 13 May 1978 One common use of crass is as an intensifier with pejorative overtones. In this use it is difficult to discern much in the way of a precise denotation: • Why did this crass flattery matter to Stalin ... ? — Time, 22 Mar. 1948 • The crass partisanship of Chairman Vinson cannot be condoned —Harold L. Ickes, New Republic, 1 Nov. 1949 • ... you should not enshrine a crass oversimplification of it —John Simon, New York, 30 Aug. 1971 It can also be used as a rather general term of disapproval. In such uses the writer may have a more precise denotation in mind, but it does not necessarily come through to the reader: • Virginia is perhaps the best of the south to-day, and Georgia is perhaps the worst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious —H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920 • ... literate, frequently funny, brash, and on occasion crass concept of what television programming will be like —Judith Crist, Saturday Rev., 21 Aug. 1976 • The strength of "The Bush Soldiers" resides not in the writing, which is often crass, but in its story of endurance —Craig McGregor, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 9 Dec. 1984 The interpretation "cheap, mercenary, greedy" is possible when the surrounding context points the way. You can find such a meaning in these next three examples, although the writers probably did not have it in mind: • ... the new business buildings in the City of London represent British philistinism in its most crass and shortsighted form —Lewis Mumford, New Yorker, 26 Sept. 1953 • He resented him as a crass and stupid person who had fallen through luck into flowing prosperity — Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, 1957 • He had removed her from that crass monied Middle Atlantic society —John Updike, Couples, 1968 The authors probably meant something closer to "insensitive," but you can easily see how Copperud's interpretation could be applied instead. We think the examples here illustrate most of the chief dimensions of the use of crass in modern English. You will perhaps understand the difficulties lexicographers and commentators have had in getting a firm grip on its quicksilver usage. |
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