| 词组 | dassent, dassn't |
| 释义 | dassent, dassn't Safire 1984 quotes a correspondent who uses the spelling dassent and another who wonders if it shouldn't have been dassn't. This contraction— from dares not, apparently—was common in the 19th century and the early 20th (the American Dialect Dictionary shows many spellings) and was used for dares not, dare not and dared not. The spelling variations are presumably intended to approximate speech. Dassent as a spelling was neither the most frequent nor the rarest: • ... and he said he would like to go, but he dassent —Marietta Holley, "A Pleasure Exertion," in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, 1888 • "... I whipped Ed Walker twice, Saturday. I don't like girls. You dassent catch toads unless with a string " —O. Henry, "The Ransom of Red Chief," 1907 Dassn't (now the commonest form) and its variations are basically dialectal but, as the use by a correspondent of Safire's suggests, are among those countrified terms trotted out for effect—usually emphasis—in otherwise straightforward writing. • You will not look, because you dassn't, At what is hidden in his bag—"Letter to V," in Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie, 1932 • Like those beetles on the waterpond, you can bend the surface tension film but you dassn't break through —Christopher Morley, The Man Who Made Friends With Himself, 1949 • ... chortling openly at the things a bigot thinks but dassn't utter —Jack O'Brien, Springfield (Mass.) Union, 1 Dec. 1973 |
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