| 释义 |
ˈunperson
[un-1 12: introduced by ‘George Orwell’.]
A person who, usu. for political misdemeanour, is deemed not to have existed and whose name is removed from all public records. In extended use, a person whose existence or achievement is officially denied or disregarded; a person of no political or social importance.
1949‘G. Orwell’ Nineteen Eighty-Four ii. 159 Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. 1954Economist 18 Sept. 883/2 Beria is already an ‘unperson’, the record of his career ‘unfacts’. 1961Guardian 28 Apr. 8/5 The concentration camp was a factory for processing people into un-persons. 1962Listener 15 Feb. 308/1 From the Soviet point of view they are ‘unpersons’, ignored or slandered in Soviet travesties of literary history. 1969H. E. Salisbury Siege of Leningrad i. iii. 24 Berezhkov omits any mention of Dekanozov's name or of the Dekanozov-Weizsäcker meeting. Because of his execution in 1953 Dekanozov apparently has become an unperson. 1981P. Dickinson Seventh Raven xi. 151 You've got absolutely nothing to do..in hospitals... Places like that tend to turn you into a kind of unperson. 1983Listener 16 June 4/1 He omitted the then Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, who seemed even then to have become an unperson.
Hence unˈperson v. to make into an unperson (usu. in pa. pple.); unˈpersoning vbl. n. Also transf.
1966Page & Burg in Soviet Stud. XVIII. 96 (title) Unpersoned: the fall of Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev. 1973Listener 4 Jan. 8/2 On television... The addition of a face..turns the newsreader into a person, but the job then requires him to unperson himself. 1976Times Lit. Suppl. 13 Feb. 156/3 The unpersoning process [in Czechoslovakia] had gathered momentum and many of the notables of 1968–69 were being rapidly transmogrified into the nobodies of the 1970s. 1977Listener 16 June 790/2 One of them dead and the other efficiently unpersoned and confined to a political asylum. 1983Daily Tel. 12 Mar. 14/2 In 1956, Bob..brought in Hamilton..as editorial director... But in the new edition it looks as if all the work was done by his successor, Harold Harris. ‘It is no trivial matter to be ‘unpersonned’,’ says Hamilton. |