| 词组 | persuasion |
| 释义 | persuasion Back in the 19th century writers like Dickens or Trollope commonly used persuasion to mean "religion"—either as a system of beliefs or as a group of people adhering to those beliefs. (The use actually goes back to the 16th and 17th centuries.) Thus a Roman Catholic might be referred to as "a person of the Catholic persuasion" or a Jew as "a person of the Hebrew persuasion." This use must have been so common as to invite parody; in 1866 Dean Alford was complaining that he had seen and heard "Jewish persuasion" and "Hebrew persuasion" so often he expected soon to encounter "an individual of the negro persuasion." So, from a word used to indicate a set of religious beliefs or believers, persuasion came to be used for any group or kind. Fowler 1926 objected to such use as "worn-out humour" and Flesch 1964 thought it sounded "genteel and Victorian." Their reservations have been ignored by writers. The older religious sense is still alive: • He is a vegetarian and a Hindu of the Kamakoti Pitam persuasion —Current Biography, September 1965 And the denigrated use is thriving: • I have cooked hundreds of batches of chili and have eaten chilies of all makes and persuasions —Craig Claiborne, N.Y. Times, 5 Nov. 1980 • With the exception of three young men of Japanese persuasion, everyone in the hall is middle-aged — Robert Alan Aurthur, Esquire, April 1973 • ... listen to fiddlers of every musical persuasion — Robert E. Tomasson, N.Y. Times, 25 May 1979 • ... women's liberationists of various persuasions — Nancy Ryan, Saturday Rev., 1 Apr. 1972 • ... where no man had ever been beaten in one-on-one basketball by an opponent of the female persuasion —Joseph Honig, TV. Y. Times, 6 Jan. 1980 |
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