首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
"What’s done cannot be undone," moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she
"What’s done cannot be undone," moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she
admin
2021-10-13
79
问题
"What’s done cannot be undone," moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she would be pleased to discover that whatever can be done can be undone, too.
Or perhaps it just seems that way in the new social spaces we are carving for ourselves online. On popular web sites devoted to social networking, innovative verbs have been springing up to describe equally innovative forms of interactions: you can friend someone on Facebook; follow a fellow user on Twitter; or favorite a video on YouTube. Change your mind? You can just as easily unfriend, unfollow or unfavorite with a click of the mouse.
The recent un-trend has also seeped into the world of advertising. KFC is marketing its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken with the tagline "UNthink: Taste the UN-fried Side of KFC. " The cellphone company MetroPCS challenges you to "Unlimit Yourself," while its competitor Boost Mobile wants you to get "UNoverage’D" and "UNcontract’D" (ridding yourself of burdensome overage fees and contracts). Even victims of the financial downturn can seek solace in un-: ABC broadcast a special report in May telling viewers how to get "Un-Broke."
Where did all of this un- activity come from? Ever since Old English, the un-prefix has come in two basic flavors. It can be used like the word "not" to negate adjectives (unkind, uncertain, unfair) and the occasional noun (unreason, unrest, unemployment). Or it can attach to a verb to indicate the reversal of an action (unbend, unfasten, unmask). Both kinds of un-are ripe for creating new words. The negative variety of the prefix has been particularly fertile for spinning off nouns, at least since 7-Up first branded itself as the "Un-Cola" in the late 1960s. In the business world we now find unconferences and unmarking, predicated on the notion that we need to rethink traditional models of conferences and marketing. And beware of unnovation, the opposite of innovation.
But it’s the reversible un- that has really been getting a workout lately, even more so than its semantic sibling de- (as in declutter or defragment). Our expectations that any action can be taken back have been primed by a few decades of personal computing, which injected the founding metaphor of "undoing" into the common consciousness. An early glimmer of our Age of Undoing appeared in a prescient 1976 research report by Lance A. Miller and John C. Thomas of I. B. M., drably titled "Behavioral Issues in the Use of Interactive Systems." "It would be quite useful," Miller and Thomas observe, "to permit users to ’take back’ at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special ’undo’ command)." Useful indeed!
The undo command would become a crucial feature of text editors and word processors in the PC era, assigned the now-familiar keyboard shortcut of Control-Z by programmers at the research center Xerox PARC. In the software of the 80’s, some undo commands became "multilevel," allowing users to take back a whole series of actions (called the undo stack), not just the most recent one. Ad-hoc un- verbs began to emerge for these reversible innovations. In 1984, the software company NewStar introduced the unerase command for its word-processing program NewWord, while I. B. M.’s VisiWord countered with undelete. From there it was a quick step to unbold-ing, unitalicizing and even un-underlining your errantly formatted text.
The Yale University linguist Laurence R. Horn sees an earlier technological metaphor at work in the flurry of un- verbs. As Horn writes in "Uncovering the Un-Word," a paper in the journal Sophia Linguistica: "The prevailing sense is that for something to unhappen, the tape of reality must be set to Rewind. That this is a practical impossibility ... does not make the metaphor any the less attractive." Rewinding the tape of reality is an appealing metaphor in science fiction, unsurprisingly. Nancy Etchemendy’s young-adult novel, "The Power of Un," features a middle-school student who operates a gizmo called "The Unner" to go back in time and undo past events.
Songwriters have also made poetic use of the un- prefix to imagine the reversal of irreversible things, notably falling in and out of love. It’s a useful lyrical trick in such genres as folk rock (Lucinda Williams’s "Unsuffer Me"), R & B (Toni Braxton’s "Un-Break My Heart") and country (Lynn Anderson’s "How Can I Unlove You?"). But as Horn points out, imaginary unloving has been going on for centuries in English literature, from Chaucer to Bronte: Jane Eyre confides, "I had learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now."
What sets latter-day un-verbs apart from these historical examples is that the "reality rewind" is no longer a flight of counterfactual fancy: it’s built right into the interfaces that we use to make sense of our shared virtual worlds.
The un-prefix can be used to do the following EXCEPT________.
选项
A、to negate adjectives
B、to reverse an action
C、to negate nouns
D、to stop an action
答案
D
解析
事实题。由第四段可知,前缀“un”可以被用来否定形容词、否定名词、撤销动作。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/SSIK777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Atsometimeinyourlifeyoumayhaveastrongdesiretodosomethingstrangeorterrible.However,chancesarethatyoudon’t
(1)Saintsshouldalwaysbejudgedguiltyuntiltheyareprovedinnocent,buttheteststhathavetobeappliedtothemarenot,
(1)OnJuly7th,IwastravelinginLondon.IwashavingbreakfastatahotelverynearLiverpoolStreetStationwhenthefirste
A、Shewasengagedinanothertrafficaccident.B、Shehadtosendtheotherdrivertothehospital.C、Shehadtolookafterthet
Duringtheearlyyearsofthiscentury,wheatwasseenastheverylifebloodofWesternCanadaPeopleoncitystreetswatchedt
NoEnglishmanbelievesinworkingfrombooklearning.Hesuspectseverythingnew,anddislikesit,unlesshecanbecompelledb
A、Severeandimpromptu.B、Severeandtedious.C、Severeandeasy.D、Severeandinordinate.A从对话中的reallystrict,twodaysoftheau
(1)ThebiggestproblemfacingChileasitpromotesitselfasatouristdestinationtobereckonedwith,isthatitisattheend
(1)TheTerm"CYBERSPACE"wascoinedbyWilliamGibson,ascience-fictionwriter.Hefirstuseditinashortstoryin1982,and
(1)GeorgeWilliams,oneofScottsdale’slastremainingcowboys,hasbeenraisinghorsesandcattleonhis120acresfor20years
随机试题
血液中大分子进入胸腺的顺序是
下列疾病均有血清尿素氮增高而血清肌酐正常,但不包括
计算机硬件系统由中央处理器、硬盘、显示器、键盘和鼠标五大基本部件构成。()
应当逮捕的犯人如果在逃,公安机关可以直接向全国发布通缉令。( )
在元代画家的笔下,花鸟画已经成为借物抒情、托物言志的途径,这种发展无疑丰富了花鸟画的内涵。发展至明清时期,许多花鸟画家更把家国观念、道德品评、祈求幸福等传统的人文精神寄托于画中,有些画家甚至将花鸟内容个性化,借以表达喜怒哀乐。因此,画家创作时重视追求境界多
规模报酬递增的工厂会不会面临要素报酬递减的情况?
党的十五大在深刻总结所有制结构改革经验的基础上,第一次明确提出,公有制为主体、多种所有制经济共同发展,是我国社会主义初级阶段的基本经济制度。实践充分证明,这一基本经济制度的确立
新发展理念的“根”和“魂”是()
一个罐子里装有黑球和白球,黑、白球数之比为R:1,现有放回地一个接一个地抽球,直到抽到黑球为止,记X为所抽的白球数.这样做了n次以后,我们获得一组样本:X1,X2,…,Xn,基于此,求R的最大似然估汁.
Nowadays,wecanpurchasethingson-line.
最新回复
(
0
)