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Describes a feeling that has taken hold of someone without any thinking behind it — a feeling that does not come from facts, and that no argument can reach. The usual partners are strong, dark feelings: unreasoning fear, unreasoning hatred, unreasoning panic, unreasoning anger, unreasoning loyalty. "An unreasoning fear of the dark." The important part is what the word is telling you about the person. It is not that they thought about it and got it wrong; it is that no thinking happened at all. The feeling simply arrived. That makes it different from unreasonable, which is the word you want almost every other time. Unreasonable describes demands, prices, requests, behaviour, people — things you can argue with ("an unreasonable boss," "unreasonable rent"). Unreasoning describes only feelings, and it says those feelings are beyond argument. You would never call your landlord unreasoning. This is a literary word. You will meet it in novels, in newspapers writing seriously about mob violence or prejudice, in a sentence like "an unreasoning hatred of strangers." You will very rarely hear it in a conversation. In speech, people say "he's just scared, there's no reason for it" or "blind panic." Blind is in fact the everyday word doing the same job — blind fear, blind hatred, blind loyalty — and it is worth knowing that pairing.
盲目的、不講道理的(形容情緒,如盲目的恐懼、盲目的仇恨)
組成un- (not) + reasoning (the act of thinking things through). Reason came into English from Old French, from Latin ratio, which meant a reckoning, a calculation, an account — the same root that gives us ratio and rational. So an unreasoning fear is literally a fear with no reckoning behind it, nothing counted up, nothing worked out.
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。
unreasoningadj
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Lacking or without reason.
- When we consider the enormous amount of suffering and disease, both of mind and body, arising from the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken, especially among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos - which possibly had their place and use in the past - can be tolerated no longer.
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。