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Atavistic feelings are the very old human ones — fear, pack loyalty, a sudden wish to fight or run — the sort people say we have carried since humans began. A writer uses atavistic when a feeling does not seem learned in this life, but dragged up from far back. Though actually, the tidy “basic human feelings” story is a stretch of a sharper idea. In science, atavism was first about a trait from a distant showing up again in a body (a throwback). The feeling-word borrows that picture: this anger, this thrill, this tribal heat is a throwback too. Newspapers love it, a little too much. They sometimes stick atavistic on anything rough, loud, or old-fashioned, which is looser than the word can honestly bear. A grandmother’s soup is not atavistic. A crowd moving as one animal might be. The word is literary and a bit . Ordinary English can just say “a very old, very deep feeling.”
返祖的；原始本能的
組成From atavism + -ic (making an adjective). Atavism came through French atavisme from Latin atavus, a very distant ancestor — built from at- + avus (“grandfather”).
同家族的字
- atavismthe noun: a throwback to a distant ancestor
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
atavisticadj/æt.əˈvɪs.tɪk/
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biologynatural-sciencesOf the recurrence of a trait reappearing after an absence of one or more generations due to a chance recombination of genes.
- Although the heterozygote gives it an atavistic appearance, the gene is not atavistic.
- Thus the gene which produced atavistic digits in the vigorous heterozygous pentadactyl condition is a lethal monster in the homozygous condition.
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Of a throwback or exhibiting primitivism.
- They made me feel that I was alive in the nineteenth century, a sort of atavistic remnant, a romantic shred […]
- The true perversion took place only in the privacy of her mind — the way she imagined an atavistic macho atop her when engaged in a mandatory contribution to the fetus-banks with some cretinous inept breeder…
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Relating to earlier, more primitive behavior that returns after an absence.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。