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Not . Something unexciting does not make you feel interested or make your heart beat faster — it is ordinary, plain, a bit boring. It is a gentle word, and that gentleness is the whole point of it. If you say a film was 'boring', you are complaining. If you say it was 'unexciting', you are being polite, or fair: the film was fine, nothing went wrong, you just did not care very much. English does this a lot — put 'un-' in front of a good word and you get a soft way to say a bad thing. Teachers, , and people at work like this word for exactly that reason. You will read it about food, films, books, jobs, football matches, and cities: 'an unexciting meal', 'an unexciting season', 'a safe, unexciting choice'. Notice that last one. 'Safe but unexciting' is almost a fixed pair in English, and it tells you something true about the word: unexciting things are often sensible things. A job with good pay and no surprises is unexciting. Nobody is saying it is a bad job. Two more things worth knowing. First, it is used far more than its opposite pattern would suggest — English says 'unexciting' much more readily than it says 'unfun' or 'uninteresting-ish', because '' is such a common word. Second, it sits almost always before the noun or after 'be': 'an unexciting town', 'the town is unexciting'. You will rarely see it in the middle of a longer phrase.
乏善可陳的、平淡無奇的;口語一點就是「還好而已、沒什麼看頭」。注意不等於「無聊」(boring)——boring 是抱怨,unexciting 比較像客氣地說「就那樣」。
組成un- (not) + exciting (making you feel interest or strong feeling). 'Exciting' comes from 'excite', which came into English from Latin excitare, 'to call out, stir up' — ex- (out) + citare (to set in motion).
同家族的字
- excitethe verb 'unexciting' is built on
- excitementthe noun from the same 'excite'
- unexpectedsame un- 'not' prefix softening a common word
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。
unexcitingadj
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Not exciting.
- Plain and unexciting, perhaps, but they are solid, well cooked, appetising and filling, and moreover cheap.
- B. Wooster: Of all the places on this great planet of ours, West Neck, Long Island, has chosen to be the most unexciting. The last time anything remotely interesting happened here was in 1842, when a tree fell over. They still talk about it in the village.
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。