| 词组 | prone, supine |
| 释义 | prone, supine Quite a few commentators insist on the distinction that prone means "face down" and supine means "face up." Harper 1975, for instance, says "It is impossible for a man to 'lie prone on his back.' Prone means 'face downward.' If he is lying on his back, he is supine." The first part of that assertion is somewhat dubious, as we shall see. John Simon's pun that "when it comes to learning good English, most people are prone to be supine" (Simon 1980) points to one of the influences operating on the meanings of these words: the chief uses of both prone and supine have nothing to do with physical position. Prone is used chiefly in the sense of "having a tendency or inclination," as in "prone to worry" or "accident-prone." Supine is used chiefly in the sense of "mentally or morally slack." The senses that relate to physical position, then, are secondary. Supine itself also complicates the situation. It is a relatively rare word: in Merriam-Webster files prone is nearly five times as frequent as supine and in the Brown University Corpus (Kucera & Francis, 1967) there are 14 prone" % to a single supine. It is clearly a less well-known word, and it is more bookish or literary than prone. A third factor is the use of prone, at least since the 18th century, with inanimate objects having no identifiable ventral surface, such as ancient towers or obelisks. In these uses prone contrasts with upright and simply means "lying flat"; the relative position on the ground is not a consideration: • The third (obelisk) which had also lain prone for a thousand years —Emil Ludwig, The Nile, 1937 • I joyfully swish my feet through the prone golden autumn harvest of leaves —Michael P. O'Connor, Irish Digest, April 1955 A fourth factor is the pejorative overtones of the most frequently used sense of supine. One that is supine is usually looked down on in some fashion, as the Simon quotation suggests. Given these four factors, it is not surprising that prone is used more loosely than some would wish in describing persons and objects having a discernible front and back. Everybody seems to agree that supine means "lying face upward," but only a few writers actually use it in general or literary contexts: • Foxy, in a ... maternity swimsuit, lay supine on a smooth rock, eyes shut, smiling —John Updike, Couples, 1968 Prone is regularly distinguished from supine in medical and physiological writing, where the distinction is a very important one. Prone regularly means lying on one's belly to those who shoot guns and write about it, but supine appears to be unknown to them. Outside these contexts, prone is sometimes used when the orientation of the body is uncertain, unknown, or unimportant: • ... I caught sight of the large prone figure in bed — D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, 1911 • I too have been prone on my couch this week, a victim of the common cold —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 20 Mar. 1961 It is even sometimes used when a human being is clearly flat on the back: • He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall —James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 When you consider all these uses, it is clear that in relation to physical position prone most often means flat on one's belly, quite often means merely flat or prostrate, and less frequently flat on one's back. It is possible that the choice of prone in this third case may be influenced by a desire to avoid the notion of passiveness connoted by supine; while such might have been the case with James Joyce, it is probable that nothing more than the relative rarity of supine works against its selection in other instances. If you are about to use prone to describe physical position, you are unimpeachably safe if an animate object is face down, or if you are describing an inanimate object. If your prone person or animal is belly up, you might incur the wrath of some critic. If that prospect displeases, you may want to use flat or prostrate instead. The expression "prone on one's back" is the one most likely to attract unfavorable notice. If your main concern is getting across the point that whoever or whatever is described as prone is lying face down, you should supply some additional clue to that intention in the context, since prone can also refer to other positions. Your reader has no certain way of divining your distinction unless you reinforce it in the context. See also prostrate. |
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