| 释义 |
dead letter
1. a. orig. A writing, etc. taken in a bare literal sense without reference to its ‘spirit’, and hence useless or ineffective (cf. Rom. vii. 6, 2 Cor. iii. 6).
1579Fulke Heskin's Parl. 6 The scriptures, which this dogge calleth the deade letters. 1652Sterry Eng. Deliv. North. Presb., 10 This..taken singly by it selfe, is but a breathlesse Carkasse, or a Dead Letter. 1831Carlyle Sart. Res. ii. iii, First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead..if the living Spirit of Religion..is to arise on us.
b. A writ, statute, ordinance, etc., which is or has become practically without force or inoperative, though not formally repealed or abolished.
1663Heath Flagellum (ed. 2) 6 To which all other dictates and Instructions were uselesse, and as a dead letter. 1726Amherst Terræ Fil. xlii. 220 The best laws, when they become dead letters, are no laws. a1754Fielding Voy. Lisbon (1755) 145 (Farmer) And to enact laws without doing this, is to fill our statute-books..still fuller with dead letter, of no use but to the printer of the Acts of Parliament. 1848Macaulay Hist. Eng. II. 132 The few penal laws..which had been made in Ireland against Protestant Noncomformists, were a dead letter. 1869Freeman Norm. Conq. (1876) III. xii. 249 Many a treaty of marriage became a dead letter almost as soon as it was signed.
c. transf. and fig. (See quots.)
1864Hotten Slang Dict. 118 Dead-letter, an action of no value or weight; an article, owing to some mistake in its production, rendered utterly valueless. 1926Fowler Mod. Eng. Usage 104/1 Dead letter..; the application of it [sc. the phrase] to what was never a regulation but has gone or is going out of use, as quill pens, horse-traction, amateur football, &c., or to a regulation that loses its force only by actual abolition (the one-sex franchise will soon be a d.l.), is a slipshod extension.
2. A letter which lies unclaimed for a certain time at a post-office, or which cannot be delivered through defect of address or other cause. Dead-letter Office: a department of a general post-office in which dead letters are examined, and returned to the writers, or destroyed after a certain time; c 1880 officially styled Returned Letter Office.
1703in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. (1838) 3rd Ser. VII. 62 The other penny is lost in dead letters (remaining in the several Post Offices). 1737London Mag. Jan. 54/1 John Jesse, Esq; Deputy Secretary of the Post-Office, succeeds the late Mr Williamson as Deputy Cashier; as does Mr John Barber, as Inspector of dead letters at the said Office. 1771P. Parsons Newmarket II. 126, I sent to the Posthouse, and purchased a pacquet of dead letters. 1812M. Edgeworth Absentee in Tales Fash. Life VI. xvii. 423 The letter went coursing after you... I took it for granted that it found its way to the dead-letter office. 1845McCulloch Taxation ii. vii. (1852) 316 With these exceptions, all packets above the weight of 16 oz. will be immediately forwarded to the Dead Letter Office. 1881Standard 1 Nov. 2/2 The old name, ‘Dead Letter Office’, has had to be altered to the present appellation, ‘Returned Letter Office’, partly in consequence of the fatuity of the public, who would insist upon associating the title ‘Dead’ letter with the ‘land of the leal’.
3. Typogr. See dead a. A. 20 d.
Hence dead-ˈletterism (nonce-wd.), devotion to the ‘dead letter’ to the neglect of the ‘spirit’ (see 1 a).
1879Baring-Gould Germany II. 186 Pietism..is also a necessary revulsion from the dead-letterism into which German Protestantism had lapsed. |