| 词组 | portentious |
| 释义 | portentious Portentious is an alteration of portentous that seems rather to show the effect of the adjective ending -ious, as in pretentious, than to be a true blend of portentous and pretentious. The earliest citations have the same meaning as the earliest sense of portentous; only the spelling has changed. The OED Supplement's earliest example, dated 1863, is spelled portenteous (the OED has a portentuous too); Archibald MacLeish in 1918 used the spelling portentious in a letter. Partridge 1942 notes that portentious "is seldom written but often uttered"; here too we see the apparent attraction of the -ious ending over -ous. Partridge notes a similar tendency with presumptuous; it is often pronounced, he says, as if it were spelled presumptious. A more familiar example of -ious for -ous is grevious (see grievous, grievously). The sense development of portentious mirrors that of portentous. The first few examples in the OED Supplement relate to a portent, a sign of the future, the oldest sense of portentous. Here is one of our examples: • ... followed 177 days later by a second solar obscuration just as portentious —Herbert J. Spinden, Annual Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1948 The OED Supplement has a 1956 citation from the Baltimore Sun in which portentious has the second sense of portentous, "prodigious": • ... you witnessed a portentious enlargement of mankind's field of knowledge. Our earliest printed citation is somewhat vague, but apparently reflects the third and newest sense of portentous, "self-consciously weighty; pompous": • The recognized rules of procedure taught in all the best night schools hardly come in with their portentious beginnings, middles, and ends —Saturday Rev., 21 Mar. 1925 Most of our recent evidence and of that in the OED Supplement is for this sense: • ... a portentious statement containing the whole truth about the meaning, or meaningless, of life — The Times, 29 Oct. 1958 (OED Supplement) • An Italian send-up of the portentious I.Q. flummery —John o' London's, 15 Feb. 1962 (OED Supplement) • ... entails a pushing-off of the traditional and the historically well-accepted, even if the push causes distortions of history and misreadings of portentious social fact —Thomas J. Cottle, Change, Summer 1971 • ... Samuel Johnson, who had something portentious to say on every topic —Ivan Sparkes, Stagecoaches & Carriages, 1975 Although portentious is still quite rare in print, it has already developed derivatives: • ... no soundtrack narrator portentiously telling us what we should be seeing, how we should feel —Vincent Canby, N.Y. Times, 4 Oct. 1967 • Portentiousness—a sense that something grave and grand, though incomprehensible, is nigh —Benjamin DeMott, N.Y. Times Mag, 23 Mar. 1969 The OED Supplement seems to be the only dictionary so far to try to account for portentious and its offspring. We do not know if it will ever establish itself, but we do know that it occasionally appears in print. It is not a word that we recommend your using. See also portentous. |
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