| 词组 | practicable, practical |
| 释义 | practicable, practical Practicable has two basic senses, "feasible" and "usable." Practical has a much wider range of meaning, but the sense closest to those of practicable is "capable of being put into use, useful." These two words form a popular topic among usage writers, who advise against confusing them. The real issue would seem to be whether practicable can be used to mean "practical," since the meaning of practical subsumes that of practicable. Judging from the evidence we have, writers by and large successfully distinguish between practicable and practical where necessary. Here is a representative sampling of practicable citations: • What Henchard had written in the anguish of his dying was respected as far as practicable —Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886 • It was not practicable to remove all of this powder without destroying some of the uncorroded metal — Jour, of Research, November 1936 • ... there was a practicable route up the southern side of Mount Everest —Eric Shipton, Geographical Jour., June 1953 • This simple and thoroughly practicable reform will not begin to solve all the defects of the income tax —Milton Friedman, reprinted column, 1969 • Loudspeaker systems had sufficiently advanced by this time to make the wiring of large theaters practicable —Peter Andrews, Saturday Rev., 12 Nov. 1977 • ... some easy, practicable strategies for achieving harmony on the job —Denise Fortino, Harper's Bazaar, August 1980 Macmillan 1982 and others claim that practicable cannot be used to describe persons, and we have found this to be true, as might be expected from the definitions. Some of our citations for practicable and practical supply a context in which either word could have been placed, and we must assume that each writer has chosen the word that correctly gets his specific meaning across. We also have a few citations in which the meaning of practicable has been confused or blurred. • ... translating the feasible into the practicable — Forest Woody Horton, Information World, May 1980 However, such uses are quite uncommon and have not established a new sense of practicable, so the distinction between practicable and practical remains valid. |
| 随便看 |
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。