| 词组 | dichotomy |
| 释义 | dichotomy After reading and rereading our stack of citations for the use of dichotomy, we have come to the conclusion that many people who use this word (and probably even more people who read or hear it) have only a general idea of what it means. This haziness on the part of purveyors of English has resulted in a word whose meaning, aside from technical uses, is likewise hazy. For someone evaluating good and bad usage or even merely trying to describe usage accurately, dichotomy presents a ticklish problem. You begin with a word the boundaries of whose meaning are so fuzzy that definitions by dictionaries (or usage commentators, for that matter) really fail to do it justice. Then, if you decide to approve only those uses covered by a given group of definitions, you will probably condemn more uses than you intended to, because even some of the relatively straightforward senses are hard to define thoroughly and precisely. Several usage commentators have responded to the uneasiness that dichotomy engenders by simply saying that it should not be used in general contexts to mean "division" or "split." Frankly, we welcome such uses because they, at least, can be pinned down to a single, clear definition. • ... the sharp dichotomy between undergraduate education and graduate professional study —Current Biography, June 1964 • ... the dichotomy between mind and body —Rollo May, Psychology Today, August 1969 Howard 1978 disapproves of using dichotomy "to mean anything divided into two or resulting from such a division; and thence to mean something paradoxical or ambivalent." Howard has paraphrased these definitions from the OED Supplement, which lumps them under one sense and illustrates them with four citations. Three of these citations are meant to be covered by the first definition (which is quite close in wording to a definition already given in the OED—one example of just how hard this word is to define). In the remaining citation dichotomy means "paradox": • By a dichotomy familiar to us all, a woman requires her own baby to be perfectly normal, and at the same time superior to all other babies —John Wyndham, TheMidwich Cuckoos, 1957 (OED Supplement) We, too, have citations in which dichotomy means "paradox" or has some other extended meaning which may not be readily decipherable from the context: • Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, fed milk to Belgian babies; Herbert Hoover as President of the United States had the war veterans of the Bonus Army bombed out of Washington by tear gas. What is this profound dichotomy? —Alfred North Whitehead, Atlantic, March 1939 • ... this same false dichotomy, "take us, or you will get Communism," ... was until recently, the strongest shield of the big dictators —Garrett Mattingly, Saturday Rev., 17 July 1948 • It is a well-known paradox that the lover of the sea craves for dry land—the sailor's love-hate extension of our old dichotomy to want to be where we are not —William Sansom, N.Y. Times Mag., 10 May 1964 • ... the Eskimo today lives in a dichotomy, in a kind of cultural and economic never-never world —D. M. Whitworth, Westways, September 1965 • ... the dichotomy or contradictions within the American mind —Richard Beale Davis, Key Reporter, Spring 1968 • ... invoking a traditional ... dichotomy, how can we understand an indefinable term except through acquaintance with what the term denotes? —Arthur Danto, Columbia Forum, Fall 1969 • ... the false dichotomy between attitudes and institutions —Todd Gitlin, Psychology Today, January 1970 • ... the traitor-patriot dichotomy has been resolved decisively in favour of the latter interpretation — Michael S. Cross, Books in Canada, June-July 1974 • ... spinning lovely dichotomies (all fairy stories have female heroines: all science comes from the ego, not the self) —Times Literary Supp., 7 July 1978 In many cases of such dichotomizing, the message that gets across to the reader is chiefly that the writer is using a fancy, academic-sounding word. If this is the impression you want to convey, dichotomy will surely serve you. If you are mainly interested in having your sentence understood, however, you might be better off finding another way to word it. |
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英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。