| 词组 | deprecate, depreciate |
| 释义 | deprecate, depreciate Contrary to the views of thirty or forty guardians of the language, deprecate and depreciate are seldom confused. Most of such confusion as exists has been introduced by those who have sought tö illuminate, but have only befogged. Among the befog-gers must be counted lexicographers, for our attempts to define and discriminate have not been notably successful. Depreciate is the easier of the two words to deal with. Its oldest use is what for convenience we shall refer to as the disparaging sense. This sense manifests itself in two ways in modern English. First, it is used in its own right: • True politeness in China demands that you should depreciate everything of your own and exalt everything belonging to your correspondent —Lord Frederic Hamilton, Vanished Pomps of Yesterday, 1934 • ... Household is at pains to depreciate and disclaim such pure thrillers as "A Rough Shoot," which he regards as rather dishonorable potboilers —L. E. Sissman, New Yorker, 1 May 1971 • Knowledge is a great thing. Nobody should depreciate it —Robert M. Hutchins, Center Mag., March 1968 • There is a tendency to depreciate the present knowledge of adsorption on solid metals —Morris Cohen, Science, 7 June 1968 This use appears to be receding, as depreciate comes more and more to be perceived as a technical term relating to monetary matters. But the figurative use of its monetary sense provides depreciate with a second way of denoting disparagement: • The body-count by which the Vietnam war is officially and journalistically reported is as good an illustration as any of how we have depreciated the value of human life —Ramsey Clark, Center Mag., July/August 1970 • Such overuse depreciates the value of useful words —Howard 1977 We should note in passing that this latter use—with value as the direct object—is not replaced by deprecate in ordinary serious writing. If depreciate is a relatively simple word to deal with, deprecate is not. Its early uses are strongly influenced by the religious associations of deprecation, its older relative, which was used as the name of a particular kind of prayer—a prayer for the removal or averting of something evil or disastrous. We can see this notion of praying or hoping to ward off or avert something in Samuel Johnson's use: • ... to call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, to deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and idolatry of folly —The Idler, 24 June 1758 The notion of seeking or hoping to turn aside or avert something undesirable, with or without the intercession of some higher power, can be seen in these examples: • It was the road ... by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms and states approached the seat of empire, to deprecate the wrath ... or sue for the protection of the Roman people —Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, 1766 • ... smilingly placed himself opposite him, with the look of one who deprecates an expected reproof — John Cowper Powys, Ducdame, 1925 • ... it would bring about the war we all dread and deprecate —Albert Guérard, Education of a Humanist, 1949 We might say that the thing deprecated in the foregoing examples is viewed with a certain amount of dread. One may also wish to ward off or avert something of which one does not approve. And in these next examples we can see the notion of disapproval mixed with that of seeking to avert or avoid: • The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind —George Eliot, Silas Marner, 1861 • His eye, which was growing quick to read Naomi's face, saw at once ... that she deprecated even the slightest reference to her weakness —Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Delectable Duchy, 1893 • "No, seriously," he said, in his quality of an amateur of dogs; "she is very fine." Even then he could not help adding: "What you can see of her!" • Whereupon Sophia shook her head, deprecating such wit —Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale, 1908 • As a Protector of the People Tiberius was held in great awe by the Rhodians But he insisted that he was merely a private citizen and deprecated any public honours paid to him. He usually dispensed with his official escort of yeomen —Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934 We may even find both dread and disapproval mixed with the seeking to ward off: • Terrible as are the potentialities of the atomic bomb, we must not waste time in deprecating its use. Instead, we must be more determined than ever to prevent the recurrence of war —Vera Micheles Dean, The Four Cornerstones of Peace, 1946 The notion of disapproval often takes over so thoroughly that the notion of seeking to ward off or avert is greatly diminished or even completely lost. • Master Cruncher ... turning to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal board —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859 • A man who advocates aesthetic effort and deprecates social effort —Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, 1878 • Always a moderate, he deprecated extremists of both sections —Dictionary of American Biography, 1936 • Another group ... deprecated all dogmas, and pled for a purely ethical religion —Will Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950 • ... it is because his championship was successful that we can now afford to deprecate his tactics — Harry Levin, Yale Rev., Summer 1954 • The flaunting lascivious attitudes toward sex so deprecated by groups wishing to restrict sexual communication to narrow channels —Lester A. Kirken-dall, ETC, June 1968 • Novels, though not forbidden, were deprecated by their parents —K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words, 1977 • The use of dashes for commas is deprecated —Howard 1984 • All needless repetition is to be deprecated —Barzun 1985 The editors of Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms found a tinge of regret in deprecate, which would seem to move it in the direction of deplore. The notion of regret is stronger in some of the next group of examples than in others, but the interpretation is possible in all of them (some are also cited in our synonym book): • There is nothing I more deprecate than the use of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to prevent the making of social experiments —Oliver Wendell Holmes d. 1935, Truaxv. Corrigan, 1921 • ... in which Wallace earnestly deprecates the modern tendency to disparage reason —W. R. Inge, The Church in the World, 1928 • I very much deprecate the House falling unduly into the debating of details and routine, and losing sight of its larger duty —Sir Winston Churchill, The Unrelenting Struggle, 1942 • I not only deprecate, I deplore, monkeyshines in Congress —Harold L. Ickes, New Republic, 2 Aug. 1943 • ... is hardly his fault, and I will content myself with deprecating the conspicuous waste of a distinguished talent —Wolcott Gibbs, New Yorker, 16 Apr. 1955 • I deprecate public debate about what the Cabinet should be doing, by members of the Cabinet —Harold Wilson, quoted in The Listener, 8 Aug. 1974 We should pause now to observe that we have entered the realm of controversy. The first use of deprecate to be criticized is its "disapprove" sense, by Ayres 1881, who believes it to be used as a synonym of disapprove, censure, condemn. Even though Ayres is not very sure what deprecate does mean—he gives several different definitions—his remarks are repeated in MacCracken & Sandison 1917 and Powell 1925, but then disappear in the growing controversy involving depreciate. We do not really know how this most controversial use—or, really, two uses—of deprecate arose. Readers Digest 1983 has the most ingenious suggestion. They found it used by Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848). He places the phrase "deprecate the value of in the mouth of a fast-talking but ill-educated auctioneer, and in the view of Reader's Digest Thackeray has used a common malapropism of the day to mark his character. But since we have no genuine evidence of deprecate with value as object and no evidence of deprecate used for the monetary sense of depreciate, we are rather doubtful. And our earliest evidence for a changed sense is not for the "disparage" sense either; it is for what we could call the "modest" sense: • He said much of their kindness to him, and his wish that he could ever have the chance to do anything for them; while they politely deprecated anything that they had done —Margaret Deland, Old Chester Tales, 1898 This use might be defined as "to make little of, play down, belittle modestly." It is clearly related to similar uses of the adjectives deprecating, deprecatory, and their apparently later compounds with self. It is a separate use of the verb that has continued: • I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his success or his efficiency, and I think with sincerity —William Butler Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil, 1922 • To his many admirers his most engaging characteristic was the way in which he deprecated his achievements —A. J. Cronin, Keys of the Kingdom, 1941 • He speaks five languages ... , but deprecates this facility —Time, 1 Dec. 1952 • ... the man who knows he too has been successful but can't help deprecating his position as an artist — Taliaferro Boatwright, N.Y. Herald Tribune Book Rev., 31 Oct. 1954 • ... was quite right to be confident, however much he might deprecate his own achievements —Goronwy Rees, The Listener, 30 Jan. 1975 • He amusingly deprecates his melodic gifts by saying that canon is good for him as he only has to write one melody —Record Roundup, November-December 1984 You have noted that in this last use of deprecate, the belittling is always directed by the subject toward himself or what he has done. When it is directed toward a second person or toward a thing, deprecate comes closer in meaning to disparage or belittle. • "I am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph," the Bishop continued, "but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man " —Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927 • The general tone of most of the clubs was ... all but abjectly respectful of the mother-country, and members spoke of "His Majesty's ship" in the harbour, while they deprecated American fruits and productions —Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving, 1944 • It is customary to deprecate the literary achievement of the past decade —James Laughlin, Spearhead, 1947 • Among Chicagoans of more than grade-school education, there is a disposition to deprecate the Colonel.... Some of the scoffers ... —A. J. Liebling, New Yorker, 19 Jan. 1952 • ... perhaps the most reluctantly admired and least easily deprecated of twentieth-century American novelists—New Yorker, 17 Dec. 1955 • And golfers by nature almost invariably deprecate any golf course they cannot break par on —Charles Price, Esquire, August 1965 • ... Western society places a premium on masculinity while often deprecating femininity —Marvin Reznikoff & Tannah Hirsch, Psychology Today, May 1970 It is instructive, we think, to try substituting depreciate for deprecate in these examples. In most of them depreciate simply does not sound quite right. We believe that it has become too strongly associated with the world of finance to sound totally suitable in literary or even psychological contexts. Belittle or disparage or even denigrate or put down will work better. It would appear that depreciate has been vacating this semantic area and that deprecate has been moving in. Now a brief look at the commentators. The issue of depreciation was introduced by the brothers Fowler in The King's English (1907). They simultaneously introduced the first obfuscation of the issue. Their objection is raised not by a use of deprecate but by a use of self-deprecatory. It can be a dangerous (because misleading) practice to base a criticism of a root verb on a use of a compound of a related adjective because to do so is to ignore the often pertinent consideration of separate semantic development. The Fowlers further obscured the issue by defining deprecate as to "pray against." The numerous commentators who followed the Fowlers' lead have not provided much additional light. A different approach was taken by Flesch 1964, who suggested avoiding the problem by replacing deprecate or depreciate with some other word or phrase. His approach suggests the complexity of deprecate: he substitutes a different word or phrase for it in each of his several examples. If you have read all the examples here, you already know a good deal about how deprecate is used. To recapitulate, we see these historical trends: depreciate has for some time been retreating into specialization as a financial term; it is less and less used as a term of disparagement. Deprecate has taken over much of depreciated old territory, although its "modest" use is one depreciate was seldom used for. You can use deprecate in any of the ways here illustrated—the sources are impeccably standard. Or you can try Flesch's approach and substitute some other word or phrase in order to avoid some of deprecated ambiguities. See also deprecating, deprecatory, depreciatory; self-deprecating, self-deprecatory. |
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