| 词组 | plenty |
| 释义 | plenty Plenty is a short word with all the vigor of speech. As such it has long been a source of worry for those who concern themselves with purity and propriety of speech. The critics started on plenty back in the 18th century and have not stopped yet. Like some other long-lived controversies, this one has developed new grounds for objection as the old grounds have lost interest. We will take up four separate issues here. 1.Predicate adjective. The original objection to plenty was to its use as a predicate adjective. Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of 1755 may have been the first to take a stand; he deemed plenty a noun substantive and he thought it used "barbarously" as an adjective meaning "plentiful." He gave two citations, however, one from the 16th-century writer Thomas Tusser and the other from Shakespeare. Shakespeare's line has subsequently been quoted often: • If reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion —I Henry IV, 1598 Joseph Priestley 1761 also deemed plenty a noun and noted its use where plentiful would have served; he did not especially disparage the use, but he did seem to consider it aberrant. Campbell 1776, however, is forthright: he calls it "so gross a vulgarism" that he would not have included it at all had he not "sometimes found it in works of considerable merit." Hall 1917 points out the contradictory nature of Campbell's statement. The OED shows that the adjectival plenty had been in use since the 14th century. At the time Campbell was being outraged, the following writers were using plenty (both quotations are from the Century Dictionary): • They seem formed for those countries where shrubs are plenty and water scarce —Oliver Goldsmith • When labourers are plenty, their wages will be low —Benjamin Franklin Nineteenth-century commentators kept plenty under comment. Fitzedward Hall 1873 listed it is his chapter on "Our Grandfathers' English," which seems to mean that he considered it to have passed from use. Ayres 1881 reprints the comments of Joseph Worcester's Dictionary (1859)—Worcester enters the adjective noting literary use and the opposition of Johnson and Campbell—and then advises using plentiful instead. Bardeen 1883 lists William Matthews (Words; their Use and Abuse, 1880) as also opposing plenty. The adverse comments were carried by numerous early 20th-century commentators too—Utter 1916, Vizetelly 1906, MacCracken & Sandison 1917, F. K. Ball 1923, Lincoln Library 1924, Hyde 1926, and Lurie 1927 among them. An exasperated editor working on Webster's Second wrote on one slip, "This is cheap pedantic Bosh." And bosh it was. The evidence shows that the predicate adjective plenty was in respectable literary use at least through the 19th century, although it is not very common in the 20th. Hall 1917 and turn-of-the-century lexicographers thought the use had continued in speech; we are not sure about present use because our evidence is scanty. It would not surprise us if the use continued to turn up from time to time, especially in literary material. Here are three older American examples: • Their peculiar oaths were getting as plenty as pronouns —Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, 1840 • ... churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whisky are scarce —Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, 1869 (OED Supplement) • Bread is never too plenty in Indian households — Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927 2. Attributive adjective. Evans 1957 says that use of plenty before the noun it modifies—in a construction just like plenty of'but with the of omitted—is a Scottish idiom. His observation is apparently based on the OED, where Murray shows just an example from Robert Louis Stevenson and a made-up example typical of current Scots. Fowler 1926, on the other hand, finds the construction similar to others in which a noun has come to be used as an attributive adjective with of omitted: "a little brandy," "a dozen apples." Fowler has perhaps made the better guess, for the construction was used by Robert Browning, not at all a Scot: • One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world ... —"The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church," 1855 Fowler opined that this construction was "still considered a solecism"; those American commentators who bother to mention the construction—Century Collegiate Handbook 1924, Watt 1967, Harper 1985, Reader's Digest 1983, Macmillan 1982, for instance—all find something wrong with it. The evidence for this use of plenty is hard to characterize overall. Browning is certainly literary, and we do have some later literary use. Most use, however, would appear to be spoken. OED and OED Supplement evidence seems to show that the main use lies outside of standard British English; besides the OED Scots examples, the Supplement provides American, Irish, Australian, and Caribbean examples and a hint of African use via Graham Greene. Here are some examples from our files. The first is by an author from Trinidad: • ... for when Indian people got married it was a big thing, plenty food and drink, plenty ceremony — Samuel Selvon, A Brighter Sun, 1952 • He is not only a Humorist but has got plenty money to show that he is —Will Rogers, The Illiterate Digest, 1924 • There's plenty wolves and catamounts Prowling in the wood.—Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie, 1932 • The answer to that was that if they did, he would immediately do something else, and find plenty reasons to support him —Maurice Hewlett, Halfway House, 1908 • ... Greek ships had plenty freight —U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings, June 1938 • ... she would close up at 5 P.M. and leave plenty memos —Christopher Morley, The Man Who Made Friends With Himself, 1949 • There were plenty days when they didn't even eat — John Dos Passos, Number One, 1943 • After the arms program tapers off, there is plenty work to be done —Time, 5 Jan. 1953 But we have found little evidence in print recently, which leads us to suspect that the attributive adjective plenty is at present chiefly in spoken use. 3. We know the adverbial plenty to be common in speech. It is also frequent in writing, although not in writing of the starchier sort. Here are numerous examples of use: • It's already plenty hot for us in the kitchen without some dolt opening the oven doors —Colton H. Bridges, Massachusetts Wildlife, November-December 1975 • ... may not be rising quite as rapidly as other health costs, but it is going up plenty fast enough —Changing Times, May 1977 • I've played under four managers in the big leagues, and each one was plenty smart —Ted Williams, Saturday Evening Post, 17 Apr. 1954 • A couple of minutes later she came down looking plenty excited —Erie Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, 1936 • The Metropolitan Museum, already plenty big, is expanding—Bruce Kovner, New York, 7 Feb. 1972 • Having practiced plenty in the interim —Peter Hell-man, N.Y. Times Mag, 22 Feb. 1976 • ... and they talk about them plenty —Evans 1962 • ... I am a lot better and plenty good enough for my purposes —E. B. White, letter, January 1945 • The boat still averaged 71.9 mph—plenty fast enough —Bob Ottum, Sports Illustrated, 19 Nov. 1984 • ... a calm, thoughtful man of forty-five, who has got around plenty ... in belles-lettres —Bernard Kalb, Saturday Rev., 9 May 1953 • The drinks may have been soft, but... the advertising claims were plenty hard —David M. Schwartz, Smithsonian, July 1986 • The "young daughter" here was seventeen and plenty nubile —Timothy Crouse, New Yorker, 30 July 1984 • Plenty peppery, this soup is filled with ... crabmeat —Jean Anderson, Bon Appetit, May 1983 4. Used with "more." Evans 1957 says that plenty may be followed by more, with or without a noun following more, wisely avoiding the trap of trying to categorize such use of plenty as belonging to one or another of the traditional parts of speech. Here is one of those annoy-ingly hard-to-classify constructions where something that may or may not follow the word in question presumably has a hand in determining its part of speech. Here are a couple of examples, for which we will let you pick your own part of speech: • ... we have plenty more to say on the subject —New Yorker, 22 Nov. 1952 • The accidental century surely has plenty more accidents in store —Times Literary Supp., 31 Mar. 1966 • The girl who'd been doing all the talking began to do plenty more —Walter Peters, in The Best from Yank, 1945 • ... on the Intrepid's deck were plenty more combustibles —C. S. Forester, The Barbary Pirates, 1953 Conclusion: The use of plenty will always have its detractors among the usage commentators. It is too vigorous, too much like plain talk for the sort of writing they seem to prefer. Almost every use that plenty has has been questioned at one time or another; all the same, the uses that are still current are also standard, at least in relaxed surroundings. We think you should feel free to use plenty where it sounds right to you. |
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