| 词组 | portentous |
| 释义 | portentous Portentous has as its earliest sense "relating to or being a portent." It can be a more neutral adjective than the similar ominous, which has come to indicate only bad things to come. Here we have a few examples: • ... the dreadful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air —Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," 1820 • ... the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous —F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited," 1931 • What seem trivial details to others may be portentous symbols to him —Harry Levin, James Joyce, 1941 Almost concurrently with its first use in the 16th century, portentous developed a second sense that in effect reflected a different point of view of the same phenomenon. If the earliest sense is focused on the portent, the second sense is focused on the observers and what they think of the event. This sense removes consideration of the future and concentrates on the thing or event itself; it means "eliciting amazement or wonder; prodigious, marvelous, monstrous." • ... the portentous strength of the Black Knight forced his way inward in despite of De Bracy and his followers —Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 1819 • ... my books and files for the last two years are beginning to assume a portentous size —Henry Adams, letter, 6 Mar. 1863 • The Secretary of Agriculture was the owner of a portentous power: within discretion ... he could raise support prices to 90% of parity whenever he thought it desirable —Time, 31 Oct. 1949 Floating somewhere between these two senses were various uses of the word in which the notion of grave consequences or of weightiness or importance were uppermost: • The assassination in itself was easy, for Caesar would take no precautions. So portentous an intention could not be kept entirely secret —J. A. Froude, Caesar, 1879 • ... when Mrs. Bridgetower was talking about any subject less portentous than the Oriental plottings in the Kremlin, she was apt to be heavily ironical — Robertson Davies, Tempest-tost, 1951 • ... and still more must his future be considered, a problem too portentous to grasp —Marcia Davenport, My Brother's Keeper, 1954 An editor of Webster's Second noticed that this sort of use was quite often applied to people, their actions, and their manner, and wrote a third definition "grave, solemn, significant" which was later refined to get across the idea that it often means "affectedly solemn, pompous." In this sense, portentous is somewhat similar to pretentious in meaning; Burchfield 1981 disapproves the sense, and it is not entered in the OED Supplement. We are not quite sure when the new sense arose, but it was well attested before 1934: • A pause. They all look portentous; but they have nothing to say —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (stage direction), 1903 • He paused, softly portentous, where he stood, and so he met Rosanna's eyes —Henry James, The Ivory Tower, 1917 • ... a parliamentary candidate, very properly got up for the job and with the portentous seriousness that comes from having a mission —Harold J. Laski, letter, 1 Nov. 1920 • Troop, Peter held, regarded all these things with a portentous solemnity —H. G. Wells, Joan and Peter, 1918 • They will turn off with a deprecating laugh any too portentous remark —Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook, 1931 • ... and then the portentous thought, when it comes, turns out to be one of the commonplaces of modern scientific philosophy —Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle, 1931 This third sense has become fully established—helped no doubt by frequent use in Time and the New Yorker in the 1950s—and is still in frequent use, especially in criticism: • To be portentous, one ought to be deeper than that —Mary McCarthy, TV. Y. Times Book Rev., 22 Apr. 1984 • ... relatively free of the portentous air and slick packaging that characterize the big networks' news shows —Thomas Whiteside, New Yorker, 3 June 1985 • portend sounds ... portentous —Flesch 1964 |
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