| 单词 | 语意 |
| 释义 | 〔fair〕The history of the wordfair illustrates how words can weaken in meaning over time. In Old English the ancestor offair, fæger, had senses such as "lovely, beautiful, pleasant, agreeable,” a far cry from our modern sense "mildly good or satisfying.”The Old English senses passed into Middle English,where the wordfair started to take a slight turn in the direction already alluded to. Fair could mean "highly to be approved of, splendid, good,”but it could also be used ironically,as in Chaucer's observation after a horse threw the Cook on the pilgrimage to Canterbury:"that was a fair feat of horsemanship by the Cook.”This ironic use was probably not responsible for the semantic weakening offair, but it shows how a positive word can have its meaning reversed.The weakening offair was most likely caused by "the determined optimism which led to the use of fair . . . rather than direct expression of discontent,”in the words of George H. McKnight.One might add as another cause the desire to avoid hurting other people's feelings.单词fair 的历史表明随岁月的流逝单词的语意变弱。 在古英语中fair，f?ger 本意是“可爱的，漂亮的，愉快的”， 与我们现在的“比较好或满意的”大相径庭。古英语传到中世纪英语时，fair 已开始在引申的方向上有微小的转变。 Fair 可以表达“被高度赞许的，辉煌的，好的，”但也可用作反语，如在往坎特伯雷朝圣的途中马将科克摔下时后，乔尔斯评论道：“那是科克精湛骑术的体现”。这种反语用法也许对fair 语义学上的弱化没有联系， 但它表明了一个褒义的单词可以变得意思完全相反。fair 的弱化很大程度上缘于“坚决的乐观主义导致 fair 的用法改变， 而不是直接表达不满意的意思，”乔治赫·马克奈特如此评论。人们可以再添上其它原因以免伤害别人的感情〔diocese〕dia- [intensive pref.] * see dia- dia- [加强调语意的前缀] * 参见 dia-〔deer〕In various Middle English textsone finds a fish, an ant, or a fox called ader, the Middle English ancestor of our worddeer. In its Old English formdēor, our word referred to any animal, including members of the deer family,and continued to do so in Middle English,although it took on the specific sense "a deer.”By the end of the Middle English period, around 1500,the general sense had all but disappeared. Deer is a commonly cited example of a semantic process called specialization,by which the range of meaning of a word is narrowed or restricted.When Shakespeare uses the expression "mice and rats, and such small deer" for Edgar's diet inKing Lear, probably written in 1605, we are not sure whetherdeer has the general or the specific sense. 在各种各样的中世纪英语文章中，人们可以发现鱼、蚂蚁或狐狸被称为der ， 这是单词deer 在中世纪英语中的雏形。 该词的古英语形式为deor， 指任何一种动物， 包括鹿科动物的成员，该用法一直延续到中世纪英语中。尽管当时该词接纳了“鹿”这一特定的意思，但到中世纪英语时期结束时，大约是1500年，该词的普通意思全部消失了。 Deer 常被引用作为语意变迁过程中的特殊化的例子，通过特殊化的过程，单词的语意范围缩小了，或受到了限制。当莎士比亚在大约1605年写李尔王 的时候，用"mice and rats，and such small deer"来表示爱德加的饮食时， 我们无法确定deer 是指普通意思还是指其特定的意思 〔encyclopedia〕The wordencyclopedia, which to us usually means a large set of books, descends from a phrase that involved coming to grips with the contents of such books.The Greek phrase isenkuklios paideia, made up of enkuklios, "cyclical, periodic, ordinary,” and paideia, "education,” and meaning "general education, literally the arts and sciences that a person should study to be liberally educated.”Copyists of Latin manuscripts took this phrase to be the Greek wordenkuklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin wordencyclopaedia, coming into English with the sense "general course of instruction,” first recorded in 1531.In New Latin the word was chosen as the title of a reference work covering all knowledge.The first such use in English is recorded in 1644.单词encyclopedia 对我们而言通常是指一大套书， 来源于一个涉及掌握这类书内容的短语。希腊片语enkuklios paideia 是由下列两个词组成的 enkuklios “循环的，周期性，平常的”以及 paideia “教育”， 含义是“普通教育，从字面上说就是一个想接受通才教育的人所应该学习的艺术和科学知识”。拉丁文手稿的抄录者将此片语当成了带有相同词义的希腊词enkuklopaedia ， 而该谬传的希腊词又构成为新拉丁语词encyclopaedia ， 带着其“指导教育的普遍课程”之语意又进入英语，最先记载于1531年。在新拉丁语中该词被选中作为一本覆盖各科知识的参考著作的书名。在英国首次这样的用法记载于1644年〔ataman〕-man [augmentative suff.] -man [增强语意的后缀] 〔dangling〕Of or being a modifier, especially a participle or participial phrase, that grammatically modifies the subject of its sentence but semantically modifies another element of the sentence or an unstated referent, asapproaching Dallas in the sentence Approaching Dallas, the skyline came into view. 垂悬：属于或是修饰词的，尤指分词或分词词组，其在语法上修饰句子的主语，但语意上是修饰句子的另一个部分或未说明的指示对象，例如在Approaching Dallas, the skyline came into view 这个句子里的 Approaching Dallas |
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