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
49
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
Properarrangementofclassroomspaceisimportanttoencouraginginteraction.Today’scorporationshirehumanengineeringspec
NoEnglishmanbelievesinworkingfrombooklearning.Hesuspectseverythingnew,anddislikesit,unlesshecanbecompelledb
A、Itintegratesanassortmentofcourses.B、ItincludesEconomicsinthecurriculum.C、Coursesaretaughtindividually.D、Studen
Duringtheearlyyearsofthiscentury,wheatwasseenastheverylifebloodofWesternCanadaPeopleoncitystreetswatchedt
Self-discipline:theFoundationofProductiveLivingI.Issuestobenoticedatthethoughtofself-disciplineA.Troublesfors
Properarrangementofclassroomspaceisimportanttoencouraginginteraction.Today’scorporationshirehumanengineeringspec
Thewordconservationhasathriftymeaning.Toconserveistosaveandprotect,toleavewhatweourselvesenjoyinsuchgoodc
(1)SiliconValleyisamagnettowhichnumeroustalentedengineers,scientistsandentrepreneursfromoverseasflockinsearcho
A、Williamcanmakeacomfortablelivingasanartist.B、Mrs.HarrisshouldpersuadeWilliamtocomedowntoearth.C、It’sunwise
随机试题
膀胱三角
男性,30岁,骑自行车摔倒,右侧胸部摔倒马路沿上,引起局部疼痛及憋气。查体:P84次/分,BP110/80mmHg,患侧胸部有压痛,呼吸音稍弱,胸片示:右侧第4、5肋骨骨折,无移位,患侧肺压缩约30%,治疗可选择.
胸骨左缘第2~4肋间闻及Ⅲ~Ⅳ级全收缩期杂音,肺动脉瓣第二心音亢进胸骨左缘第2肋间闻及粗糙的连续性机器样杂音,并向颈、背部传导
癫痫持续状态的定义是
免疫球蛋白降低见于
患者,男性,78岁。面色苍白、食欲不振半年余。查体:皮肤黏膜苍白,舌乳头萎缩,呈“牛肉样舌”。血红蛋白80g/L,白细胞3.2×109/L,血小板66×109/L,网织红细胞3.4%,平均红细胞体积(MCV)124fl,白细胞分类正常。首先考虑诊断为
实施无痛肌内注射的措施,下列哪项不妥()。
建设项目负债筹资的来源主要有()。
A、Becausesheusedtheman’sscreen.B、Becausesheusedthewallinstead.C、Becauseshewouldbuyacheaperonelater.D、Because
Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteanessayentitledVoiceYourOpinionbycommentingonthesaying,"Silenceis
最新回复
(
0
)