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Easily influenced by what other people say or do, or by what you see and hear. If you are suggestible, an idea can be put into your head from outside and you take it as your own, often without noticing that it came from outside at all. It is used about people who are trusting, or young, or tired, or in a strange situation — a child listening to an older kid, a person under hypnosis, a witness who is asked a question in a leading way. Note the shape of the word: it does NOT mean 'able to be suggested' the way 'washable' means 'able to be washed'. The person is the one who is open to suggestion, not the thing being suggested. It is a slightly formal word — you meet it in books, in psychology, in news writing about advertising or scams — and it is usually a soft criticism. Calling someone suggestible is not calling them stupid; it means their guard is down. It often comes with a phrase saying how much: 'highly suggestible', 'very suggestible'. There is a second, thinner use where it just means 'open to persuasion' with no criticism at all, but the worried meaning is much more common, and you will not go wrong assuming it is there.
易受暗示的、耳根軟的。心理學上多半講「易受暗示」(催眠、誘導性問話的情境);日常講一個人容易被別人牽著走,台灣人會說「耳根軟」「沒主見」。注意不要因為看到 suggest 就理解成「可以被建議的」。
組成suggest(提議、把想法放進別人心裡)+ -ible(可以被…的)。-ible 從拉丁文 -ibilis 來,經過古法文 -ible 進入英文。字面是「可以被提議影響的」,也就是別人一說什麼,就進得去。suggest 本身來自拉丁文 suggerere,字面「從下面搬上來」——想法不是硬塞的,是悄悄從底下遞上來的,這個畫面正好對上這個字的意思。
同家族的字
- suggestion同樣從 suggest 來;suggestible 的人就是容易被 suggestion 影響的人
- suggestive也從 suggest 來,但方向相反:suggestive 是「會讓人聯想到…的」,發出暗示;suggestible 是接收暗示
- visible共用 -ible 這個字尾(可被看見的)
- possible共用 -ible 字尾
原始詞典資料1 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。
suggestibleadj
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Susceptible to influence by suggestion; easily swayed.
- In Europe, through his clinical and forensic work, Gisli Gudjonsson noted that some individuals seemed to be more suggestible than others. This approach assumed that suggestibility is a trait and led to the development of a model of interrogative suggestibility (Gudjonsson & Clark, 1986).
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。