2020-11-27
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด P – Personage & person
แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น
ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค
Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง Personage = ‘PUR-suh-nij’
ออกเสียง person = ‘PUR-suhn’
Dictionary.com
SYNONYM STUDY FOR PERSON
Person, individual, personage
are terms applied to human beings.
Person is the most general and common word:
the average person.
Individual views a person as standing alone or as a single member of a group:
the characteristics of the individual;
its implication is sometimes derogatory:
a disagreeable individual.
Personage is used (sometimes ironically)
of an outstanding or illustrious person:
We have a distinguished personage visiting us today.
Dictionary.com
GRAMMAR NOTES FOR PERSON
There is understandable confusion about theplural of this word.
Is it persons or people? Person
—like other regular English nouns—constructs itsgrammatical plural
by adding -s, forming persons.
This has been so since person came into Middle English in the late twelfth century.
But as far back as the fourteenth century, some writers,
including the poet Chaucer, were using an entirely different word
— people, not persons —asthe functional plural of person.
And today, people seems more natural,
especially in casual, informal conversation or writing.
Using people as a plural of person
has not always been free of controversy.
From the mid nineteenth to the late twentieth century,
the use of people instead of persons washotly contested;
and among some news publications, book publishers,
and writers of usage books, it was expressly forbidden.
To quell the fires of the argument,
some usage authorities attempted to regulate use of the two forms
—recommending persons when counting a small, specific number of individuals ( Three persons were injured in the accident )
and people when referring to a large, round, or uncountable number
(More than two thousand people bought tickets on the first day;
People crowded around the exhibit, blocking it from view).
But efforts to impose such precise rules in language usually fail.
This rule does not appear in currently popular style manuals,
and if such a rule still exists in anyone's mind,
it is mainly ignored.
People is the plural form that most people aremost comfortable with most of the time.
Persons seems excessively formal and stilted inordinary conversation or casual writing.
One would probably not say,
“How many persons came to your birthday party?”
In legal or formal contexts,
however, persons is often the form of choice
(The police are looking for any person or persons who may have witnessed the crime; Occupancy by more than 75 persons is prohibited by the fire marshal).
In addition,
persons is often used when we pluralize person in a set phrase
(missing persons; persons of interest).
Otherwise, the modern consensus is that people isthe preferred plural.
Persons is not wrong, but it is increasingly rare.
Dictionary.com
USAGE NOTE FOR -PERSON
The -person compounds are increasingly used,
especially in the press, on radio and television, and in government and corporate communications,
with the object of avoiding sex discrimination in language.
Earlier practice was to use -man asthe final element in such compounds regardless of the sex of the person referred to
(anchorman; businessman)
or to use -woman whenreferring to a woman (anchorwoman; businesswoman).
Some object to these new -person compounds
on the grounds that they are awkward or unnecessary,
insisting that the equivalent
and long-used compounds in -man are generic, not sex-marked.
Others reject the -man compounds
as discriminatory when applied to women or to persons
whose sex is unknown or irrelevant.
To resolve the argument,
certain terms can be successfully shortened (anchor; chair).
See also chairperson, -ess, lady, -man, -woman.
BRITISH DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS FOR PERSON
USAGE FOR PERSON
People is the word usually used torefer to more than one individual:
there were a hundred people at the reception.
Persons is rarely used, except in official English:
several persons were interviewed
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Words at Play
The Difference Between 'Person' and 'Personage'
Both words have personality
Language changes just fast enough that we notice
—and usually we disapprove of those changes that we notice.
Relatively new words to American English arefrequently criticized:
think of impactful, ginormous, or bae,
all of which rub some people the wrong way.
A personage is "a person of high rank"
or "a dramatic, fictional,
or historical character.”
Its least-common meaning still in current use is a synonym of “person.”
Often it’s harder to observe the decline in usage of a given word.
It’s much less dramatic.
One example is personage,
a word that has eight definitions in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, four of which are labeled either archaic or obsolete.
The Latin word persona meant“actor’s mask” or “actor’s role,”
and our word person, its first descendant in English,
initially meant both “an individual human being”
and “a character or part in a play,”
the latter being the meaning of the French word personnage.
In fact, both person and personage came from French,
and the -age suffix used in words like dosage, postage, and orphanage
can sometimes specifically mean “state” or “rank,”
as in the high-status peerage or the low-status peonage.
A personage was therefore “a person of high rank”
—one of the ways the word is still used today
(frequently with a modifier such as “historical personage,” “distinguished personage,” or “royal personage.”)
Personage can also mean “a dramatic, fictional, or historical character.”
Its least-common meaning still in current use isa synonym of “person.”
The rareness of this use of the word may be
due to a common prejudice against longer words used
when shorter words can do the job
(people criticize utilize whenused to mean use for the same reason).
The meanings of personage that have fallen from use over time are mostly abstract:
“the form or appearance of a person,”
“a person of specified bodily form,”
“a representation of a human being,” and
“one’s self, personality, or personal identity.”
You might think that persona wasthe oldest of these related words in English, since it entered the language directly from Latin.
In fact, it’s the newest: it came to English centuries later than the others,
in the 1700s, during a time when scholars in England introduced words from Greek and Latin (which is why the Latin plural form is commonly seen in dramatis personae). That original meaning, “actor’s mask,” neverreally caught on; it was the use of the term by psychologist Carl Jung in the early 1900s, referring to the outward attitude or projected character of a person, that did.
(Jung’s psychology also popularized the words archetype and synchronicity.)
So, it might be said that
a personage is simply a person withan impressive persona.
Dictionary of Problem Words and Expression
Personage & person
Personage is a term
reserved for an individual of important ordistinction
and for a character in a play or novel:
“Whether one liked him or not, no one could deny that the late Charles de Gaulle of France was a personage.”
“Hamlet is a personage who shows both strength and weakness of purpose.”
Person refers to a human being, whether man, woman, or child:
“Every person requires a certain amount of food.”
