| 词组 | culminate |
| 释义 | culminate 1. When culminate is used with a preposition, the choice is usually in: • ... must face the prospect of a steady physiological decline that culminates in senility and death — Albert Rosenfeld, Saturday Rev., 2 Oct. 1976 • If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 Culminate is also used with with occasionally: • This rite ... culminates with the sacrifice of a llama —W. Stanley Rycroft, ed., Indians of the High Andes, 1946 Other prepositions—as, at, into, and over—have also appeared, but not so often: • ... the forces ... culminate as a tendency to force the liquid toward the periphery and not to rotate it —Harry G. Armstrong, Principles and Practice of Aviation Medicine, 1939 • ... the mountain-building forces were active at irregular intervals culminating at the close of the Carboniferous —American Guide Series: New Hampshire, 1938 • The pseudoplasmodium ... migrates for a considerable distance before it culminates into a sporocarp —Constantine John Alexopoulos, Introductory Mycology, 2nd ed., 1962 • It culminates over the question of which of the two will complete the mission —Alan Brody, Hartford Studies in Literature, vol. 1, nö. 1, 1969 2. Bernstein 1965 objects to culminate used transitively because it "is generally considered exceptional." The OED had labeled the sense rare, but the Supplement contains the note, "Delete rare and add later examples." The examples here are later than those in the Supplement: • The disagreement over Indo-China culminates a series of incidents —Denis Healey, New Republic, 17 May 1954 • ... as a marriage ceremony used to culminate a romance —Frederick Andrews, Wall Street Jour., 6 Mar. 1975 • ... the two Great Pyramids of Giza that culminated this period —Walter Sullivan, N. Y. Times, 29 Jan. 1975 3. Bernstein 1965 and Bryson 1984 both insist that culminate must mean "to rise to the highest point." Both are newspapermen, and as such are likely to ignore literary usage and perhaps to cast an excessively cold eye on journalistic usage when it takes a direction which they are unfamiliar with. In short, their objection is a quibble, apparently based on etymology. In 20th-century writing culminate is used overwhelmingly in a figurative sense, and the "highest point" is very often simply the end point of some sequence: • ... a state of nervousness that culminated as Lydia entered —George Bernard Shaw, Cashel Byron's Profession, 1886 • ... the process of disintegration which for our generation culminates in that treaty —T. S. Eliot, "Dante," in Selected Essays, 1932 • Self-mortification tended to assume more and more violent forms, till it culminated in the strange aberrations of Egyptian eremitism —W. R. Inge, The Church in the World, 1928 • ... abstract moral speculations, culminating in rigid maxims, are necessarily sterile and vain —Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923 • ... his growing pallor, in the end to culminate in a touch of green —Osbert Sitwell, Noble Essences, 1950 • ... such a paroxysm of indignation as could culminate only in giving one's immediate notice —Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, 1930 • ... exile and savage persecution culminating in the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history —Noam Chomsky, Columbia Forum, Winter 1969 • ... the somewhat lax proof-reading throughout, which culminates in the extraordinary vision of a "sadistic madam" (read "madman") perched on the throne of the Caesars —Times Literary Supp., 19 Mar. 1971 Such uses as these are entirely proper even when they occur in journalistic rather than literary prose. |
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