| 词组 | polyglot |
| 释义 | polyglot Copperud 1980 objects to a use of polyglot as a noun that he found in this sentence: • Most of the valley is a verdant and prosperous polyglot of cities. What the writer quoted is driving at is not especially clear from the sentence as given without surrounding context. Copperud hazards a guess that it might mean "mixture." Polyglot does have a noun sense meaning "mixture"—it has been around since the 18th century— but for a long time the mixture was usually of something linguistic, if not languages, then nomenclature or terminology: • Modifications in the transplanted nomenclatures immediately became necessary There resulted a polyglot of diagnostic labels and systems —George N. Raines, M.D., Foreword to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders, 1952 • ... the language of electrophysiology is a polyglot drawn from all these disciplines —Robert Galam-bos, Nerves and Muscles, 1962 In the middle of this century we began to find uses in which the linguistic connection becomes tenuous indeed, and the notion of a heterogeneous mixture seems uppermost: • ... the polyglot of inferior courts that speckle the judicial map —Our State and Local Government of New York, 1954 • ... the clapboard stalls of the countryside are loaded with a polyglot of twentieth century Continental luxuries —Paul Grimes, N.Y. Times, 4 June 1961 Sometimes the referent is clearly a diverse ethnic mixture, with its implication of many languages, and so the use is closer in spirit to the original sense: • ... Chicago's 43rd Ward, a polyglot —Newsweek, 23 Feb. 1959 • ... America is the world's most cosmopolitan nation, a polyglot of all mankind —Robin Prestage, Saturday Rev., 1 Jan. 1972 • Many of the new ethnic neighborhoods are polyglots, mixes of many nationalities —Nancy Harmon Jenkins, N.Y. Times Mag, 3 Nov. 1985 An extension of the "mixture" sense of the noun polyglot to the notion of a diverse mixture of ethnic or national backgrounds seems to have been developing for some thirty or more years now. It is perhaps this sense that Copperud's author intended. It is not recorded in dictionaries yet, but it seems to be moving toward respectability. |
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