- 1貶低、自貶
When you demean someone, you do or say something that makes other people think less of them. You put them lower. You treat them as smaller or cheaper than they are. You can also demean yourself: you do something that makes people lose respect for you. A boss who mocks a worker in front of everyone demeans that worker. A person who lies and crawls may feel they have demeaned themselves. It is a serious, slightly formal word. In easy talk people more often say put down, talk down to, or make someone look bad. You will meet it in news, school writing, and talks about fairness. Though actually, English has two different verbs that look the same. This one, the one you are learning, was built as “make low.” There is an older demean that meant “behave” or “carry yourself,” and that one belongs with demeanour. Almost nobody uses that old verb now. One messy leftover: demean yourself today always means “make yourself look small.” Long ago the same shape could just mean “behave,” with no shame in it. The shame reading won.
組成de- (down, making lower) + mean in the old sense “low, common, base.” That mean is the same old adjective as mean “unkind” or “poor-looking.” It is not mean “average,” and not the verb mean “signify.”
原始詞典資料10 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，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。
demeanverb詞源 1/dɪˈmiːn/
- 1
To debase; to lower; to degrade.
- It was, of course, Mrs. Sedley's opinion that her son would demean himself by a marriage with an artist's daughter.
- I liked to feel him attempt to demean me when I was sure there was no way he actually could.
- 2
To humble; to humiliate.
- 3
To mortify.
demeanverb詞源 2/dɪˈmiːn/
- 1
obsoleteTo manage; to conduct; to treat.
- But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter.
- 2
archaicTo conduct; to behave; to comport; followed by the reflexive pronoun.
- they have demean'd themselves Like men born to renown by life or death.
- They answered […] that they should demean themselves according to their instructions.
demeannoun詞源 2/dɪˈmiːn/
- 1
obsoleteManagement; treatment.
- Pursu'd him streight, in mynd to bene ywroken / Of all the vile demeane, and vsage bad
- 2
obsoleteBehavior; conduct; bearing; demeanor.
- ‘When thou hast all this doen, then bring me newes / Of his demeane […].’
- with grave demean and solemn vanity
demeannoun詞源 3/dɪˈmiːn/
- 1
demesne.
- 2
resources; means.
demeanverb詞源 4/ˌdiːˈmiːn/
- 1
mathematicssciencesstatisticsTo subtract the mean from (a value, or every observation in a data set).
- Concerning FE estimation, it makes no difference whether you demean the data with unit-specific means computed on (balanced) T observations per unit, or with unit-specific means computed on (unbalanced) Tᵢ observations per unit.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。