Adjacent or near?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Adjacent or near?

Question: What's the difference between "adjacent" and "near"?

My comments:

This is a question raised by a reader who works as an architect. "Adjacent", she said, is a word she encounters often in architectural magazines. "I've looked it up and I know its meaning (near or close to something else). But I wonder why I keep seeing 'adjacent' all the time. I mean, can 'adjacent' be replaced by the shorter and simpler 'near'? If not, why?"

This is a simple question, yet it is one from which we can all learn something.

If you look up "adjacent" in the dictionary, you'll see that "something that is adjacent to something else, especially a room, building, or area, is next to it: The fire started in the building adjacent to the library" (Longman).

NEXT to it.

A building "adjacent" to the library is "near" and "close" to it, yes, but the words are not interchangeable. There are many buildings nearby the library, perhaps, but the adjacent building is the one that sits right NEXT to it. "Next" means the two buildings are sitting side by side, adjoining each other and without any space in between them.

Her confusion, I guess, arises from taking things for granted. In studying English, we often fall into the trap of taking meanings for granted.

We are often careless with English. This may have to do with our Chinese upbringing. The Chinese language is kind of gooey, you see, in the sense that the words are round-edged, vague and esoteric, not at all sharp, pointed and prickly. Try to use a Chinese idiom and you realize you don't have to be precise for it to work. Your idiom does not have to hit the bull's eye to be effective, as long as the words reach the broad target or its neighborhood or, by a stretch, the universe at large. By "universe", I mean precisely anywhere near, even adjacent. In Chinese, this would make sense any way.