To forbear accent on the second syllable means to abstain or avoid something; also no dispute. Its past tense is forbore, and something could have been forborne. A problem occurs, though, with for e bearer. They sometimes choose forebearers , which makes a certain sense because our forefathers had to bear the responsibility of government be fore us. Fun and informative! Fun facts about English delivered weekly right to your inbox.
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It seems that Wordlady is in a schoolmarmy reproving sort of mood in time for back-to-school, so once again I am writing about a - gasp - language error. I have recently seen several instances where people used the word "forebearer" when what they meant was "forebear" an ancestor or predecessor. Although the famously inclusive Merriam-Webster dictionaries have an entry for "forebearer", and even the famously judgemental American Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that this variant may soon be acceptable but not yet , most American and British dictionaries and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary consider "forebearer" to be a mistake.
It is not really surprising that people make this mistake, because you would think, looking at the word "forebear", that it comes from "fore" plus "bear", i.
But astonishingly, this is not true. The word was originally "forebeer", nothing to do with ale, but simply a noun "be-er", that is, someone who was before you. It was originally a Scottish term, which explains why the vowel was pronounced more like "bay" than like "be". Most dictionaries accept "forbear" as a variant spelling of "forebear", but my advice would be to keep "forebear" for the noun and "forbear" for the verb, now very formal, meaning "refrain from doing something", e. The apparent post uptick is due to dictionaries and recent editions of 19th-century books being loaded onto Google Books.
Future generations, moreover, could use the myth to claim the moral and intellectual high ground over presumably naive forebears. We may be thankful that our linguistic forebears reduced this to a familiar monosyllable. These examples remind us to forebear from generalizations until a more complete overview of topographical variations is achieved.
It opened up for them resources of power and riches that were unavailable to their stateless forebears. Consequently, we would expect to find left-cerebral control of vocalization, but not right-handedness, in the earlier hominids or their primate forebears.
Surely the work of our forebears is more valuable to us than old wine. These bridge the gap between the mistakes and discoveries of our forebears, and our own daily lives and surrounds. For many centuries our forebears were free to abandon their children, although child abandonment elicits strict legal punishment today.
The diet of our forebears is always a matter of general interest, but to the nutritionist it is of more practical interest. They differed from their putative forebears by approaching psychiatric treatment within the framework of an autonomous mind.
Simultaneously, generational differences between noble fathers and sons led the latter to create an individual style very different from that of their forebears. Put simply, at a broad level our expectations are different from those of our forebears.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. Did you know? Litwack can be seen in some respects as an intellectual forebear of recent movements to focus attention on the plight of marginalized groups in American life.
First Known Use of forebear 15th century, in the meaning defined above. Learn More About forebear. Time Traveler for forebear The first known use of forebear was in the 15th century See more words from the same century. Listen to Our Podcast About forebear. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of forebear.
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