Adjacent or near?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Adjacent or near?

But one of the beauties of English writing lies in the precision with which one plays with words, using specific words with precise meanings. John Updike, who wrote the famed Rabbit novels, is known for his precision prose. In Invisible Cathedral (A walk through the new Modern Museum or Art), he wrote (New Yorker, Issue of 2004-11-15):

"In 1996, the Dorset Hotel (fondly remembered for its exiguous lobby and slow elevators) and several adjacent brownstones on Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth came up for sale, and the museum acquired them, giving it a property stretching from St. Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue, to the Museum of American Folk Art, a few doors up from Sixth Avenue."

I bet the "several adjacent brownstones" in the paragraph above are "next to" the Dorset Hotel, rather than just being in the neighborhood. When you visit New York, don't forget to check it out. But here, I just want you to read Updike for a taste of precision English.

The opening paragraph of the Invisible Cathedral goes (To read the story in full, hit this link - http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/041115crat_atlarge?041115crat_atlarge):

Times Square has been sanitized and skyscraperized; the subway cars are brightly lit inside and graffiti-free inside and out. New York is going pristine. It is not easy, while gingerly stepping over loose floorboards and extension cords as thick as boa constrictors, to picture the new Museum of Modern Art in every tidy and clean-swept detail, but enough was on view last month to persuade this visitor that the final effect will be immaculate, rectilinear, capacious, and chaste. Whether or not more could be asked of a museum, of a modern museum, I don't know. The white interiors, chamber upon chamber, some already hung with old friends from MOMA's collection and some as bare as a freshly plastered storage closet, gave, a few weeks shy of their unveiling to the public, the impression of a condition delicately balanced between presence and absence. The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, is Japanese, and a riddling Zen reticence presided over the acres of white wall and white-oak floor, the countless beady little halogen spotlights on their discreetly recessed tracks, the sheets of light-filtering "fritted" glass with their tiny pale strips of baked-in ceramic, and the hushed escalators, whose oily works, not yet functional, were exposed to view and to the ministrations of workmen. Looking into these gears laid bare put me in mind, nostalgically, of the early Giacometti sculpture, "Woman with Her Throat Cut," that used to lie on a low pedestal on the second floor, and of Arnaldo Pomodoro's great bronze ball, its polished skin partially flayed, that for a time sat in the old lobby.