| 词组 | point in time |
| 释义 | point in time Bureaucracy makes an easy target for criticism of many kinds, not excluding criticism of English usage. Harper 1975, 1985, for instance, has a whole entry devoted to bureaucratic barbarism. Part of this entry reads The tendency of bureaucrats to use two or three elaborate words or phrases when a simple word would suffice was never more in evidence than during the final months of the Nixon administration" at this (or that) point in time" became an instant cliché.... Point in time (sometimes point of time) was indeed brought forcefully to public attention during the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974, but it had been in use a long time before that. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., mentioned the phrase as frequent among State Department people in the 1960s: • ... never said "at this time" but "at this point in time." —A Thousand Days, 1965 (in Nickles 1974) But bureaucrats are hardly the only people to use the phrase. It has even been prescribed: • Do not use period for point of time —Long 1888 And usage commentators too have been known to use the phrase: • The first and obvious meaning is to put back to an earlier point of time —Harper 1975, 1985 (at set back) • A locus of moods, impulses, ideas, behaviors, external forces, etc., at a given point in time and space — Thomas H. Middleton, Saturday Rev., 4 Sept. 1976 Other writers on language and grammar have found it useful: • The exact point in time has not yet been fixed — David Mellinkoff, The Language of the Law, 1963 • The other tenses, called perfect tenses, refer to time in a more complex way. They place an action or a statement in some relation to a specified point in time—Battles et al. 1982 Reviewers and essayists use it: • All of these men felt... that their life's work was, at each point in time, breaking against the shore of the moment —Donald Hall, Goatfoot Milktongue Twin-bird, 1978 • How can we wonder at an Englishman telling a darkling tale at this point in time —Celia Betsky, Saturday Rev., 5 Apr. 1975 • ... a comprehensive history of Irish music, beginning about the third century A.D., a point in time some fourteen centuries before the earliest authentic example of notated Irish music —Times Literary Supp., 19 Feb. 1971 Biographers use it: • At this point in time—1890—Independence was by no means the quaint little farming community — Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman, 1972 • One has a strange propensity to fix upon some point of time from whence a better course of life may begin —James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 1785 Not to mention historians and educators: • But it is not only the contemporary historian who may feel a twinge of self-doubt about his educational role at this point in time —Gordon Wright, American Historical Rev., February 1976 • Purists might raise their eyebrows at such an academic anomaly; but at this point of time we can appreciate how important was to be the role played by this degree —Sir James Mountford, British Universities, 1966 • ... little effect on what a person learns between any two points in time —Annual Report, Educational Testing Service, 1966-1967 Bureaucrats can be blamed for a lot of things, but they cannot reasonably be blamed for point in (or of) time. The Watergate hearings seem to have brought the phrase to the attention of the commentators; so far Shaw 1987, Harper 1975, 1985, Zinsser 1976, Phythian 1979, Janis 1984, Nickles 1974, and Little, Brown 1986 have had their say. Point in time is, frankly, the long way round; you can use it if you want it for rhythm or another stylistic reason. Otherwise, you will probably do as well with either time or point by itself. |
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