首页
登录
职称英语
"What’s done cannot be undone," moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalki
"What’s done cannot be undone," moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalki
游客
2024-12-28
14
管理
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 UNfried 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 unmarketing, 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 JohnC. Thomas ofI.
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 PAR
C. 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 New Star introduced the unerase command for its word-processing program NewWord, whileI.B.M.’s VisiWord countered with undelete. From there it was a quick step to unbolding, 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 Bront~: 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. [br] What is true about the un-verbs used nowadays?
选项
A、People use them to reflect their fancy.
B、People use them to reverse irreversible things.
C、People use them to undo past events in their life.
D、People use them in the interfaces of the virtual worlds.
答案
D
解析
此题是推断题。由最后一段可知,un一动词被用在虚拟世界的界面上,这是与以往un-动词的区别。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3888189.html
相关试题推荐
Whoisthemostfamouspoetinthe18thcenturyAmerica?A、PhilipFreneau.B、Henr
______isNOTwrittenbythefamousChartistpoet,ErnestJones.A、ADreamofJohn
RobertBurnsisafamousromantic______.A、poetB、essayistC、dramatistD、novelist
______wrotethefamousproseworkUtopia.A、FrancisBaconB、ThomasMoreC、Philip
WhichofthefollowingisNOTafamouspublicsecondaryschoolforboys?A、Eton.
WhichoneofthefollowingstatementsistrueofWilliamFaulkner?A、Heisfamous
Inthelate17thcentury,themostfamouswriterswereA、JohnBunyanandJohnMil
"What’sdonecannotbeundone,"moanedLadyMacbethinherfamoussleepwalki
"What’sdonecannotbeundone,"moanedLadyMacbethinherfamoussleepwalki
"What’sdonecannotbeundone,"moanedLadyMacbethinherfamoussleepwalki
随机试题
PASSAGEONE[br]Whatdoes"parlous"meaninParagraph2?Perilous/dangerous
HereIwanttotrytogiveyouananswertothequestion:whatpersonalqua
[originaltext]W:Excuseme.MywatchstoppedrunningandI’mnotsurewhat’s
产品检验是指用某种方法()产品的一种或多种质量特性并将测定结果与判别标准相比
交易成本指达成一笔交易所要花费的成本,也指买卖过程中所花费的全部时间和货币成本,
患者,女性,23岁。产后第5天出血寒战、高热、腰痛,尿白细胞30个/HP,且伴有
现行药典三部收载A.药材及饮片、植物油脂和提取物、成方制剂和单味制剂 B.
甲状腺肿块活检,镜下见肿瘤细胞呈滤泡状生长,细胞核呈典型毛玻璃样改变,核重叠,有
涉及证券市场的法律、法规中,行政法规是由()制定并颁布的。A:全国人民代表大会
根据《建筑施工企业安全生产许可证相关规定》下列施工企业的违法行为中,属于应当撤销
最新回复
(
0
)