| 词组 | presently |
| 释义 | presently An ill-founded notion, of fairly recent origin, holds that there is something wrong with the sense of presently that means "at present, now." For instance, the Oxford American Dictionary says that careful writers avoid the sense; Shaw 1975 calls it "debatable and inaccurate"; Copperud 1970 cites four authorities who think presently would be best reserved to mean "before long." How these opinions came to be held is a moderately complex story which involves some history: the history of the word, of its treatment in dictionaries, and of its treatment by the usage commentators. The "at present" sense of presently has been in use more or less continuously since 1485. According to the OED, it appears to have dropped out of literary English in the 17th century. It seems, however, to have continued in nonliterary use; the OED notes it as common in Scottish writers and "most other English dialects." Although 18th- and 19th-century citations are not numerous, the sense stayed in use. Thackeray knew it: • I have been thinking over our conversation of yesterday, and it has not improved the gaiety of the work on w[hich] I am presently busy —letter, 4 Mar. 1862 The sense became more common in the 20th century. The OED cites a 1901 Leeds newspaper; here are a few examples from our files: • I have no use for him presently —Lady Gregory, Darner's Gold, in New Comedies, 1913 • ... Professor Eric Walker—presently of the University of Capetown—Times Literary Supp., 12 Sept. 1936 • ... for sheer theatrical ineptitude the once-esteemed Guild presently hasn't a rival this side of an Arkansas little theatre —George Jean Nathan, Newsweek, 10 Oct. 1938 • ... the diseases which presently afflict the South — Saturday Rev., 28 Dec. 1940 • When the presently available bacitracin is used — JAMA, 12 Mar. 1949 • ... is presently chief editor at Chappell —Herbert Warren Wind, New Yorker, 17 Nov. 1951 • ... the government departments which presently share in the maladministration of Eskimo affairs — John Nicol, Canadian Forum, June 1952 • Lasser is presently fiddling around with ideas for a book —E. J. Kahn, Jr., New Yorker, 14 Mar. 1953 • ... but neither is presently able to engage in a sustained practical politics of its own —Irving Howe, Partisan Rev., January-February 1954 Dictionary treatment of the "at present" sense has been somewhat spotty. Samuel Johnson, working with mostly literary material, had no citations for the sense more recent than the 16th and 17th centuries; he marked the sense obsolete. Noah Webster in 1828 followed Johnson and left it obsolete, as did Merriam-Webster dictionaries following Webster, right up through 1909. When the OED evidence for the sense became available in 1909, Webster 1909 had already been edited and the sense labeled Obs. The editors of the 1934 edition labeled the sense Rare exc. dial, and included the quotation from Lady Gregory above. The 1934 treatment brought us quite a bit of correspondence, some of it wondering if the quotation from Lady Gregory was meant to imply that the sense was of the Irish dialect, but most of it enclosing newspaper clippings and wondering why we thought it was rare. But most of our current evidence had been gathered after the book was published (the dial, was derived from the longer statement in the OED). Consequently in 1947 the entry was revised to show the sense as current; the sense has been treated as current in all our subsequent dictionaries. There seems to have been no interest in the sense from a standpoint of linguistic propriety until the early 1950s. Our earliest evidence is a 1951 letter to the editor of the Christian Science Monitor in which the writer claims to find ambiguous the perfectly obvious sentence "The ship presently has a length of 600 feet." Theodore Bernstein appears to have been the first usage writer to take a position against the sense: in Winners & Sinners (3 Feb. 1954) he states "'Presently' means 'forthwith' or 'soon'; it does not mean 'at present.'" By 1958 when he collected his comments into a book, he softened the remark: "'Presently' should be reserved for the meaning 'forthwith' or 'soon'; it should not be diluted to take in also 'at present.'" (He would retreat farther in his 1965 and 1977 books.) Once Bernstein had let the genie out of the bottle, there was no getting it back, and numerous usage commentators have come forward to condemn the use, generally on the ground that it can be ambiguous. This observation is buttressed with a context-free example made up for the purpose. In actual use, the word is almost never ambiguous. When presently means "at present," it is used in modern contexts with the present tense of a verb. When it is used to mean "before long," it most often goes with a verb in the past or in the future. When the "before long" sense is used with a present-tense verb, the context usually suffices to make the meaning clear. Genuinely ambiguous uses are very hard to find. If there is any restriction on the "at present" sense of presently, it is that it is used more often in business and political writing than in more literary or academic prose, but it is not infrequent in such writings either: • ... the paradoxical and uncertain fame which Lévi-Strauss presently enjoys —Times Literary Supp., 2 May 1968 • Seven states of the Union presently maintain hanging as the maximum penalty for first-degree murder —Lamberts 1972 We close with a citation from a political writer: • The fastest-rising welfare cost is Medicaid, presently paid by the states and cities —William Safire, Springfield (Mass.) Morning Union, 29 Jan. 1982 In his New York Times Magazine column of 14 Dec. 1980, Safire recommended avoiding the word entirely because of its ambiguity. Conclusion: the sense of presently meaning "at present" has been in more or less continuous standard use since 1485. The commentators who warn against its use do so without good reason. There is nothing wrong with it. |
| 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。