- 1懷疑者；哲學課上的「懷疑論者」
A skeptic is a person who does not take a claim at face value. They want reasons, a test, or a second look before they say yes. You will meet the word around news, medicine ads, big promises, and science class: someone can be a skeptic about a diet, a , or a “trust me” story. People who write about tricks and false claims sometimes wear it as a label for themselves. In older, more English, the Skeptics were a group of who said we cannot be sure we know the truth; that meaning still lives in philosophy class, but it is not what most people mean at dinner. This spelling with k is the American one. British English . Same word, said the same way, with a hard sk- at the front, never like septic. Calling someone a skeptic is not an insult by itself, though the person you doubt may not enjoy it. Though actually, English speakers do not always agree how far a skeptic has already made up their mind. Said softly, it means careful. Said hard, it can mean they will not be persuaded.
組成English borrowed it from Middle French sceptique, or perhaps straight from Late Latin scepticus, first used of the Skeptics. That Latin word goes back to an old Italic form meaning “seeing, watching,” from a root *speḱ- “to see,” so the old idea is someone who looks hard instead of taking a thing on trust. There is a Greek cousin, skopéō “to view, examine.” The American k spelling matches the hard c sound; British sceptic keeps the older c.
同家族的字
- scepticthe British spelling of the same word
- skepticalthe adjective: the doubting feeling or look
- skepticismthe noun for the attitude, or the school of thought
原始詞典資料3 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。
skepticnoun/ˈskɛp.tɪk/
- 1
Someone who doubts beliefs, claims, plans, etc. that are accepted by others as true or appropriate, especially one who habitually does so.
- But for the fly he might have made me think He had been at his poetry , comparing Nailhead with fly and fly with huckleberry : How like a fly , how very like a fly . But the real fly he missed would never do ; The missed fly made me dangerously skeptic.[…]
- The official account of this meeting was that it ended in failure, with the Taliban's mullah Omar telling General Ahmed, “Osama will be the last person to leave Afghanistan.” The 9/11 skeptics believe that meeting was meant to fail.
- 2
Someone who is skeptical towards religion.
skepticadj/ˈskɛp.tɪk/
- 1
Skeptical.
- This view of the Great Pyramid is being adopted by a widening circle of Christian believers, until even a skeptic scientist has dignified it as “the religion of the Pyramid!”
- No one but you can convince my heart, the stubborn, skeptic heart of mine to break the bad habit of breaking away.
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。