| 释义 |
ˈhalf-man
a. A eunuch.
b. One who is only half-human, or deficient in humanity.
c1000ælfric Gram. viii. (Z.) 27 Hic..semiuir healfmann. 1610Healey St. Aug. Citie of God xix. xii. (1620) 720 Calling him halfe-man, for his inhuman barbarism. 1727Somerville Poems 357 (Jod.) Sha Sefi, among eunuchs bred..Beardless, halfmen. 1932R. Knox Broadcast Minds vii. 160 We are introduced to a pack of half-men doing a maypole-dance round the Tree. 1941V. Woolf Between Acts 90 My child's not my child... I'm a half-man. 1954P. H. Johnson Impossible Marriage 299 A lot of half-men who don't wash.
c. In Carlyle's use, one of two eminent men whose knowledge and attainments complement those of the other.
1832Carlyle in Fraser's Mag. VI. 413/2 They were the two half-men of their time: whoso should combine the intrepid Candour, and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume, with the Reverence, the Love, and devout Humility of Johnson, were the whole man of a new time. 1838Mill in Westm. Rev. XXXI. 484 He [sc. Bentham] could be a systematic and accurately logical half-man; hunting half-truths to their consequences and practical applications, on a scale both of greatness and of minuteness not previously exemplified. 1953R. P. Anschutz Philos. J. S. Mill iv. 61 As Carlyle had regarded Hume and Dr. Johnson as the two half-men of their time, so did Mill regard Bentham and Coleridge as ‘the great seminal minds’ who succeeded them. To Bentham it was given, Mill considered, to discern the truths with which existing doctrines and institutions were at variance; to Coleridge the neglected truths which lay in them. Since moreover it was in these terms also that the generality of early Victorians thought about politics, Mill and Carlyle in their turn came to be regarded as the two half-men of that age. |