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Undiscriminating describes a person who cannot — or does not bother to — tell good from bad, and so accepts everything equally. It sits on the judger, not the thing judged. An undiscriminating reader will read anything put in front of them; an undiscriminating eats whatever is on the plate without noticing whether it is good; an undiscriminating audience claps for everything. The tone is usually a gentle put-down, especially about taste in food, films, music, or clothes, and it hints that the person is missing something they could learn to notice. But it is not always — used about an animal or a child it can be almost : "our dog has an undiscriminating appetite". Here is the part worth slowing down for. English "discriminate" has drifted into two lives. When people say "discrimination" today they nearly always mean the bad kind — treating people by race or sex — and that meaning has become so loud that the older, neutral one is . But the older sense simply means "to see a difference", and it survives inside a few phrases: a palate, a collector, taste — all compliments. Undiscriminating belongs entirely to that older family. Nobody hears anything about racism in it. It is a formal, written, slightly old-fashioned word; younger speakers are more likely to say "they've got no taste" or "they'll watch literally anything". A near-twin is "indiscriminate", but that one describes the action, not the person.
不加辨別的、沒品味的、來者不拒的(這裡的 discriminate 是「辨別」的老意思,跟「歧視」無關)
組成un- (not) + discriminating. Discriminate goes back to Latin discrimen, a dividing line or separation, from a root meaning to sift or separate. So the picture underneath is sorting things into piles — and undiscriminating is not sorting at all.
同家族的字
- discriminatethe verb this is the negative of; older neutral sense: to see a difference
- discriminationsame root; now usually the unfair-treatment sense
- indiscriminatesame root, different negative prefix: done without picking or choosing
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。
undiscriminatingadj
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Not discriminating
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。