| 单词 | fulsome |
| 例句 | fulsome adjective •he paid fulsome tribute to his secretary:excessive, extravagant, overdone, immoderate, inordinate, over-appreciative, flattering, adulatory, fawning, unctuous, ingratiating, cloying, saccharine | enthusiastic, effusive, rapturous, glowing, gushing, profuse, generous, lavish | informal over the top, smarmy.WORD NOTE fulsome Revenge is a dish best savored when taken cold. At last, some years after writing The Professor and the Madman, I can now have my say in reply to those who accused me of misusing the word fulsome. I imagine I must have had 60 letters from readers, all professing outrage that in the book I had employed the phrase •The most fulsome remarks made about the volunteers… and had in doing so misapplied and misunderstood the word grotesquely. Fulsome, they thundered, means "physically loathsome, foul, disgusting." How dare I to misuse it so—and in, of all places, a book about words? Does this not place the credibility of the entire book at stake? Well, I can reply at last: no it does not, because fulsome does mean exactly what I wanted it to mean: "abundant, plentiful, tending to cloying overabundance" usually used in reference to gross or excessive flattery, over-demonstrative affection, or the like. The readers who fulminated so were using out-of-date dictionaries, or prescriptive texts that demanded rather than described how words should, in the opinions of a small band of editors, be used. Fulsome, admittedly once laden with pejorative senses, has lately come to mean "abundant and excessive." Words evolve (as the Oxford English Dictionary constantly reminds us) and they do so evidently rather more rapidly than does the thinking and lexical understanding (this being the revenge, here supped on cold) of some of my correspondents. — SWConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage. |
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