Word of Year: ‘pragmatic’ 此字眼恰恰與胡適之先生有點關係
By STEPHANIE REITZ Associated Press December 15, 2011 8:40AM
FILE -- A pencil points out "Pragmatic", Merriam-Webster's annual word of the year in Boston, Wednesday Dec. 14, 2011. The adjective, which means practical and locgical, was looked up so often on the company's online dictionary site that the publisher said "Pragmatic" was the pragmatic choice. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Updated: December 16, 2011 2:22AM
When the time came for Merriam-Webster to pick its top word of 2011, its editors decided they needed to be pragmatic.
So they chose ... pragmatic.
The word, an adjective that means practical and logical, was looked up so often on Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary that the publisher says “pragmatic” was the pragmatic choice for its 2011 Word of the Year.
Though it wasn’t traced to a specific news event or quote from a famous person, searches for “pragmatic” jumped in the weeks before Congress voted in August to increase the nation’s debt ceiling, and again as its supercommittee tried to craft deficit-cutting measures this fall.
“Pragmatic” may have sparked dictionary users’ interest both because they’d heard it in conversations, and because it captures the current American mood of encouraging practicality over frivolity, said John Morse, president and publisher of Springfield, Mass.-based Merriam-Webster.
“‘Pragmatic’ is a word that describes a kind of quality that people value in themselves but also look for in others, and look for in policymakers and the activities of people around them,” Morse said.
A new feature on Merriam-Webster’s site allows users to tell the dictionary publisher why they sought that specific word, and the feedback from those who looked up “pragmatic” was that they wanted to reaffirm that the connotation was positive.
“People have a general sense of what the word meant and in fact had even been using it, but then they had a moment when they thought to themselves, ‘Perhaps I ought to look up that word and make sure it means what I think it means,’” Morse said.
Merriam-Webster has been picking its annual top choice since 2003. Previous winners include: austerity (2010), admonish (2009) and bailout (2008).
“Austerity” also made the top 10 list in 2011 along with ambivalence, insidious, didactic, diversity, capitalism, socialism, vitriol and “après moi le deluge.”
That quote, attributed to King Louis XV of France, translates to, “After me, the flood,” and was used by columnist David Gergen in a piece about the Congressional supercommittee’s failure to reach a deficit-cutting deal.
Merriam-Webster says it’s generally used to allude to people who behave as if they don’t care about the future, since “the flood” will happen after they’re gone.
Morse and Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, said they would not have been surprised if some people had expected “occupy” to be the 2011 Word of the Year because of the interest raised by Occupy Wall Street protests and similar encampments.
Though it was used a lot in conversation, “occupy” did not prompt an unusual number of searches.
“It’s like the dog that doesn’t bark. ‘Occupy’ or ‘recession’ or ‘entitlement’ are words you see pop up occasionally in the daily log of lookups, but not in the yearly log,” Sokolowski said.
“Occupy” still has a chance to grab a spot in the linguistic limelight, though, because it’s being considered among the front-runners for the American Dialect Society’s 2011 Word of the Year.
That group’s annual choice isn’t driven by dictionary lookups, but is a word or phrase that members consider widely used, demonstrably new or popular and reflects the year’s popular discourse — similar, in a sense, to Time’s selection of Person of the Year. The magazine chose “the protester” as its person of the year for 2011.
The American Dialect Society will announce its selection Jan. 6 after a vote at its annual convention in Portland, Ore., and the group’s executive secretary, Allan Metcalf, says “occupy” is getting a lot of buzz.
But so is “Tebow time,” a concept that alludes to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow’s ability to rally late-game comebacks — and, in a broader sense, applied to any success or comeback at crunch time.
“Maybe ‘Tebow time’ might win the Word of the Year in the crunch, but we have two weeks left to go, so who knows what other words might pop up,” said Metcalf, who is also an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and author of “OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.”
Another outlet, the London-based Oxford English Dictionary, also named its 2011 word choice in November: “squeezed middle,” a primarily term credited to British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband to describe the financial pinch felt by the middle class in Great Britain.
Born in Shanghai, his father was a geographer, his mother an illiterate peasant (who chose his wife for him when he was eleven). Hu Shih was an intellectual prodigy, won a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to Cornell (where he was called "Doc"). He went on to study at Columbia under the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey and became one of his outstanding disciples. Hu Shih once said that philosophy was his profession, literature his entertainment, politics his obligation. Literature was much more than just enjoyment: on his return to China in 1917, he crusaded for the paihua (vernacular language) movement, which gave that vast land a written language corresponding to its spoken tongue, thus breaking the ancient literary monopoly of the mandarins and making reading and writing accessible to the people.--Time 周刊: 胡適: The Departed Traveler:只不見去年的遊伴
A Pragmatist and his free spirit: the half-century romance of Hu Shih and Edith Clifford Williams - Google 圖書結果
books.google.com/books?isbn=9629963418...Susan Chan Egan, Chih-P'Ing Chou - 2009 - 香港:中文大學周質平的中文書早問市: 胡適與韋蓮司:深情五十年 台北:聯經 1998
instrumentalism
(ĭn'strə-mĕn'tl-ĭz'əm)
n.
A pragmatic theory that ideas are instruments that function as guides of action, their validity being determined by the success of the action.
[名][U]道具主義, 概念道具説：概念の価値は行動の手段としての有効性によって決まるというDeweyの考え方.
pragmatic[prag・mat・ic]
- レベル：社会人必須
- 発音記号[prægmǽtik]
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