| 释义 |
midlife orig. U.S.
Also mid-life.
[f. mid a. + life n.]
1. (midˈlife). Middle age; the part of life between youth and old age. Freq. in phr. in (also at) midlife.
1895in Funk & Wagnalls Stand. Dict. 1952Dylan Thomas In Country Sleep 16 Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined And druid herons' vows. 1965Genetic Psychol. Monographs LXXII. 139 (title) Ability and social adjustment at midlife of persons judged mentally deficient. 1980N.Y. Times 29 June XXI. 9/2 It is much more common for people to seek fulfillment by changing careers in midlife than it was a generation ago. 1981N.Y. Times Mag. 24 May 31/3 (heading) Single at midlife. 1986J. Thompson Half Way 11 Three ‘Thoughts’ I gave on ‘The in-between times of life’..concerned adolescence, midlife and retirement.
2. attrib. (ˈmidlife).
a. gen.
1976Economist 29 May 87/3 In a mid-life career break, he hit trouble trying to run a college. 1978Detroit Free Press 5 Mar. (Parade Suppl.) 6 (caption) Lahr believes a mid-life breakup could affect the structure of the family for generations. 1980Christian Science Monitor 9 June b8/1 A selection of..early and midlife correspondence strung together with narrative notes. 1982N.Y. Times 23 Feb. c13/2 Even when the heat of a midlife affair dulls the narrator's usual cynicism, her litany of detail lets us see the lurking bitterness that she herself ignores. 1986P. D. James Taste for Death i. vi. 59 It had been something more profound, less explicable, than disillusionment, mid-life restlessness.
b. midlife crisis Psychol., an emotional crisis occurring in midlife, characterized by the feeling that one is growing old or that life is ‘passing one by’.
1965E. Jaques in Internat. Jrnl. Psycho-Anal. XLVI. 502/1 Less familiar perhaps, though nonetheless real, are the crises which occur around the age of 35—which I shall term the *mid-life crisis—and at full maturity around the age of 65. 1972N.Y. Times 31 Dec. iv. 10/3 There is a marked increase in the death rate between the ages of 35 to 40 for employed men, apparently as a result of this ‘mid-life crisis’. 1978J. Updike Coup (1979) iv. 131 Those streams and shady gardens old, harried Mohamet conjured up in the after-hours babble of his mid-life crisis. 1986J. Thompson Half Way 11, I am now middle-aged, and can begin to look back on what was for me a midlife crisis. |
