| 单词 | 日常语言 |
| 释义 | 〔literary〕Appropriate to literature rather than everyday speech or writing.文雅的：适于文学而不是日常语言或写作的〔equal〕It has been argued thatequal is an absolute term— two quantities either are or are not equal—and hence cannot be qualified as to degree.Therefore one cannot logically speak ofa more equal allocation of resources among the departments. However, this usage was accepted by 71 percent of the Usage Panel in an earlier survey.What is more, objection to the usage betrays a widespread but questionable assumptionthat it is in mathematics and logic that we find the model of accuracy most appropriate to the everyday use of language,a supposition that also underlies traditional grammatical discussions of words such asunique, parallel, and center. According to this account,the "precise" or "literal" meaning ofequal is realized in the use of the equal sign in an arithmetic expression such as 5 + 2 = 7; and the ordinary-language uses of the term,though they may be permissible,represent "loose" or "imprecise" extensions of that sense.But in fact the mathematical concept of equality is a poor model for using the wordequal to describe relations between things in the world. As applied to such things,statements of equality are always relative to an implicit standard of tolerance.When someone saysThe two boards are of equal length, we assume that the equality is reckoned to some order of approximation determined by the context;if we did not,we would be required always to usenearly equal when speaking of the dimensions of physical objects. What is more,we often want to predicate equality of things that do not admit of quantitative measurement,as when we sayThe college draft was introduced in an effort to make the teams in the National Football League as equal as possible, orThe candidates for the job should all be given equal consideration. In all such cases,equality is naturally a gradient notionand so is amenable to modification in degree.This much is evident from the existence of the wordunequal. The prefixun- attaches only to gradient adjectives: we sayunmanly but not unmale; and the worduneven can be applied to a surface (whose evenness may be a matter of degree) but not to a number (whose evenness is an either-or affair). ·The adverbequally is generally regarded as redundant when used in combination with as, and the following examples employingequally as were termed unacceptable by 63 percent of the Usage Panel in an earlier survey: 单词equal 一向被认为是一个很绝对的词语—— 两个数量要么相同要么不同——这样就不能有程度上的差别。所以，如果有人说在各部门间对资源更公平的分配 ，那么就不合逻辑了。 但是这种用法在早先的用法调查中被百分之七十一用法使用小组的人接受。而且，对这种用法的反对体现出了一种很流行但却值得怀疑的假设，那就是我们从数学和逻辑中得出适用于日常语言准确性的实例，而这种假设也可从我们对一些词，如unique，parallel 和 center 传统的语法讨论中体现出来。 根据这个解释，equal “准确”或“书面”的意思则是由在算术表达式，如5+2=7中所运用的相同的符号而表达清楚的； 而该词在日常语言中的用法，虽然被允许，但却代表了其含意“松散”或“不严谨”的引申。但是实际上用数学概念上的相等来运用equal 这个词描述世上各种事物之间的关系是一个很差劲的例子。 当该词应用于生活中的事物时，相等的观念往往与暗含的容忍相关联。当有人说两块木板同样长 时， 我们会认为由于上下文的关系，相等可以被看作大约近似；如果我们不这样想，那么当我们谈到物体的尺寸时，就要经常使用nearly equal 。 另外，我们常常会预测和数量无关的事物的相同性，比如我们会说，引入大学的要求是为了使全国足球联合会中的各队尽可能平等 ， 或者应给予该项工作的应征者同等的考虑 。 在所有这些例子中，相等是个可变化的概念，所以可在程度有所不同。Unequal 这个词的存在就是很好的证明。 un- 这个前缀只附加于有程序变化的形容词， 我们说unmanly 但不说 unmale ； 而uneven 这个词只能用于某物的表面（其平坦可有程度上的差别）， 而不能用于数目（数目只能说相等或不相等）。Equally 这一副词在与 as 连用时通常被认为是多余的， 在早先的用法调查中，以下这些使用equally as 的句子遭到百分之六十三使用小组的人反对： 〔vernacularize〕To translate into the everyday language spoken by a people:使方言化，用方言表达：把…译成某民族的日常语言： |
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