填空题
Someone struck by an event will often say, "Words fail me." Shock, disbelief or anger leaves them unable to synchronize heart, brain and mouth. After a bit of huffing and puffing, words begin to splutter out again as fast and disorganized as water over rocks, which is the way most conversation tumbles along. But what happens when we fail words? That can be more serious.
There are warning signs of this betrayal. One is the grafting of fancy new fruit onto old wordstock. Novelist Kingsley Amis pronounced 20 years ago: "If there"s one word that sums up everything that"s gone wrong since the War, it"s workshop ." Amis, ever waspish, presumably was fuming about the 39 of a place of craft into a synonym for group 40 , or into a vacuous verb, as in, "Say Arthur, how "bout we do breakfast and 41 that scenario?"
Another indicator of cracks in the building blocks of 42 is elongation, such as the cancerous spread—its cells multiplying 43 than sixfold—of "war" to "military intervention." Once the 44 takes hold, sense can double back upon itself. In 45 Orwell"s Nineteen eighty-Four , suddenly "War is peace. Freedom is 46 . Ignorance is strength."
Sometimes we fail words because we let a 47 sense mist into another. For example, disinterested, meaning unbiased, has been 48 up by uninterested. A person in court wants the judge to be one but 49 the other. And if your lawyer is discomfited, he may not be 50 uncomfortable but overwhelmingly defeated, or routed. In 51 case, any praise he may get from you will be fulsome, not copious 52 insincere.
Where"s the enormity in all this—enormity meaning 53 , not hugeness? An old wordsmith I knew, the late Stephen Murray-Smith, 54 that while it"s stuffy to resist blindly the fact that meanings change, "when a new 55 tends to diminish or drive out an old and important usage it should be 56 ." He urged people to fight "the enormity of using enormity to mean enormous."
The problem runs 57 than the loss of clarity in euphemism or maddening appropriations by advertisers. We can even 58 cede a time-honored meaning to those in need of a less prejudicial tag, as in gay.