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这些新兴词汇其实血统古老,你知道吗?

线话英语|2017-02-24 16:24:04

事实上,今天的一些年轻人使用的词汇并不是新出现的词汇。这里有五个单词你可能认为是21世纪的产物,这实际上这些词很早就出现了。

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LOL 大声笑

I spent some years wondering why my Dad ended his text messages to me suggesting he was ‘laughing out loud’, often when no joke appeared to have been made, until I realised that he was under the impression that LOL meant ‘lots of love’. It’s 1-0 to me here, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates LOL for ‘laughing out loud’as far back as 1989, and doesn’t currently include it as an abbreviation for ‘lots of love’–but both of us are beaten, chronologically, by a definition that dates back to 1960, where LOL is used as an initialism (but not an acronym) for ‘little old lady’.

我花了几年在想为什么我爸爸总以哈哈大笑结束他的短信,而短息也并没有玩笑话,直到我意识到,他的印象中LOL表示lots of love大量的爱。根据《牛津英语词典》,从1989年起,LOL表示“哈哈大笑”,并没有把它作为lots of love的缩写,但出乎我们意料的,追溯到1960年,LOL用作little old lady(小老太)的缩写。

 

Text, v.文本;发短信

Often developments in the English language are looked at askance by those who would class themselves as purists, and I’ve heard more than one person cry out in anguish at the idea of text as a verb. It’sbecome a part of everyday language for many people, describing the action of sending a text message on a mobile phone. But before your hackles rise, it’s worth knowing that text, as a verb, is the oldest of the five words in this article –dating to 1564. True, that sense made no mention of the mobile phone (unsurprisingly), meaning instead ‘to cite texts’, but another 16th-century sense describes a situation familiar to anybody who has tried to convey shouting in a text message, or accidentally hit caps lock on their keyboard: ‘to inscribe, write, or print in capital or large letters’.

纯粹主义者总是用挑剔的眼光来看待英语语言的发展,我听到不止一个人在认为text不能作为一个动词。然而,它作为动词使用已经成为许多人的日常用语,描述手机发送一个文本消息的过程。令你惊讶的是,text作为一个动词使用可以追溯到1564年的文章中,是最古老的五个词之一。这个意义与手机无关,相反,其意思为引用文本,但另一个16世纪的用法为强调信息或者用大写字母书写。

 

Unfriend 解除好友关系

As was recently explored on OxfordWords, the influence of Facebook on language is quite widespread. The verb unfriend, though it has gained widespread currency as the ultimate act of social severance in social media, dates back to 1659, according to current OED findings. It existed even earlier as a noun –as far back as 1275.

正如牛津词汇最近发现,Facebook对语言的影响相当广泛。动词unfriend,作为解除好友关系的使用方法已经较为普遍,根据《牛津英语词典》记载,这种用法可以但追溯到1659年。Unfriend早在1275年的时候,就作为名词使用。

 

Fanboy/Fangirl 狂热爱好者

If your love of Sherlock, Doctor Who, or, indeed, any cultural phenomenon crosses the borderline between admiration and fanaticism, then chances are you’ve been labelled a fanboy or fangirl. They are simple compounds from the words fan and boy or girl.the OED currently dates fanboy’s first appearance in print to 1919 (the original Sherlock Holmes stories were published between 1887 and 1927). Fangirl wasn’t too far behind, in 1934. At the moment the OED doesn’t include verbal uses of these words, but the Oxford Corpus suggests these are growing in popularity.

如果你非常喜欢神探夏洛克、神秘博士或者其他文化作品,你可能被视为“fanboy/fangirl”(狂热爱好者),这两个词是由单词fan 、boy 和girl形成的复合词。因为目前《牛津英语词典》中fanboy第一次出现要追溯到1919年(最早的福尔摩斯故事发表在1887年到1927年之间)。Fangirl出现在不久之后的1934年。当时《牛津英语词典》并没有收录这些词的口头表达,但牛津语料库表明这些词汇将会越来越受欢迎。

 

Hip-hop 街舞,即兴音乐;嘻哈

The modern sense of hip-hop, a noun and adjective denoting a style of popular music of US black and Hispanic origin, is currently dated to 1981 in the OED, but it was preceded by over 300 years by an adverbial use meaning ‘with hopping movement’. At the moment, the second Duke of Buckingham is recorded as having written the earliest instance of hip-hop, in a play called The Rehearsal, which, to my mind, makes him something of a hip-hop icon.

hip-hop现代的含义可以作为名词和形容词,表示一种起源于美国黑人和西班牙裔的流行音乐,这种用法在《牛津英语词典》中可追溯至1981年。但之前300多年,hip-hop作为状语使用,表示“带有跳跃的运动”。目前,第二任白金汉公爵最早使用hip-hop,将其写入戏剧《彩排》中。在我看来,这使得他某种程度上成为嘻哈达人。

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