[2011.12.27] 年度词汇

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 04:57

本帖最后由 yannanchen 于 2011-12-28 11:06 编辑

IT'S that time of year. Fretting about pounds put on over the long holiday break. Throwing Christmas wrapping into the fire. Contemplating gift returns. Beginning to wonder how much you really needed a long break with your extended family (though I must say truthfully that my in-laws are dead easy to spend two weeks with). Wondering which New Year's party will be the best. (My tip: low expectations correlate strongly with fun New Year's Eves.  Expectations for the Best Party Ever guarantee disappointment.) 这是一年中的那种时刻：为漫长假期花掉的钱烦躁不已，将圣诞节的包装扔进火里，盘算礼物回报情况，想知道自己究竟在多大程度上需要与亲属们一起度过长假（尽管诚实地说，我必须花上两周时间来陪自己的姻亲们）想知道哪一个新年聚会是最好的。（我的小提示：期望越低，除夕越有趣；期望越高，失望越大）

不尽意啊， 还有错。

每年都免不了有这个时候。长假中吃喝添的膘掉不了因而烦躁。收受圣诞节礼物带来的一堆包装纸需要烧掉。既收了礼就得盘算如何回礼这个头痛的事。还有，我真的需要这么长的一个假期跟七大姑八大姨厮混吗，这倒是要开始想一想了（不过，天地良心，我的姻亲们不讨厌， 跟他们泡上两周忒容易。） 另外， 还要考虑参加哪个除夕酒会最好。 （我的经验是：无论选择哪个酒会， 都要降低自己的期望，低期望则多开心。 抱着非去一个平生最佳的酒会不可的心理， 注定要失望的。）


家庭有核心家庭（夫妻子女， 不包括双方父母）和扩大家庭（包括in-laws， 各方父母和兄弟姐妹）

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:07

a Johnson friend, Ben Zimmer, the New Words supremo at the American Dialect Society.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/fancy_words
Johnson 是TE的一个语言栏目，
此名来自词典学家Johnson

Language
Johnson

About Johnson
In this blog, named after the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, our correspondents write about the effects that the use (and sometimes abuse) of language have on politics, society and culture around the world

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:11

Benjamin Zimmer (born 1971)[1] is an American linguist and lexicographer. He is the executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. He was the "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine from March 2010 to February 2011 and formerly a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and an editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

Zimmer graduated from Yale University in 1992 with a B.A. degree in linguistics, and went on to study linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago.[1] For his research on the languages of Indonesia, he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation,[2] the Fulbright Program,[3] and the Social Science Research Council.[4] He was a Ford Foundation Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles[5] and taught at Kenyon College and Rutgers University.[1]

In 2005, Zimmer was named a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and became a regular contributor to Language Log, a group weblog on language and linguistics.[6] He was named editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press in 2006,[7] and the following year launched "From A to Zimmer," a weekly lexicography column on the OUP blog.[8]

In 2008, Zimmer was appointed executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an interactive reference tool from Thinkmap, Inc.[9][10] He edits the content of the online magazine of the Visual Thesaurus and writes a regular column on word origins entitled "Word Routes."[11]

Zimmer's writing on language has appeared in two blog anthologies: Ultimate Blogs (Vintage, 2008, ISBN 978-0307278067)[12][13] and Far from the Madding Gerund (William, James, 2006, ISBN 978-1590280553).[14][15] He has also written for Slate[16] and The Boston Globe.[17] His research on word origins was frequently cited by William Safire's "On Language" column for The New York Times Magazine.

Zimmer serves on the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society.[18] and chairs the society's New Words Committee.[1] He is also a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.[19]

On March 11, 2010, The New York Times Magazine announced the appointment of Zimmer as the new “On Language” columnist. Zimmer succeeded William Safire, who was the founding and regular columnist until his death in late 2009.[20] Zimmer's last "On Language" column was published on February 27, 2011. In it, Zimmer wrote that the column was "finally coming to a close ..." and that ..."it [was] time to bid adieu, after some 1,500 dispatches from the frontiers of language

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:12

tittilate.？？？

titillate

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:21

The Grinch is a fictional character created by Dr. Seuss. He first appeared as the main protagonist in the 1957 children's book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

The devious, anti-holiday spirit of the character has led to the name "Grinch" becoming a term used to describe a person opposed to Christmas time celebrations [1][2][3] or to someone with a coarse, greedy attitude.[4] In fact, a document in the live-action film (the Book of Who) stated that "The term Grinchy shall apply when Christmas spirit is in short supply".

The Grinch has since become an icon of the winter holidays, despite the character's hatred of the season, and has appeared on various forms of memorabilia such as Christmas ornaments, plush dolls, Halloween costumes, and various clothing items.[5]

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:26

Do a good turn.


13. A deed or action having a good or bad effect on another: "He thought some friend had done him an ill turn" (Stephen Crane).

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:27

with a polite and apologetic tip of the hat to a Johnson friend, Ben Zimmer, the New Words supremo at the American Dialect Society
注意这句跟下一个句子的呼应
Mr Zimmer replied in rebuttal.

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:29

The "Word of the Year" need not be a wordNovember 23, 2011 @ 8:40 am · Filed by Ben Zimmer under Words words words

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My colleague Geoff Pullum has objected to the selection of squeezed middle as Oxford Dictionaries' 2011 Word of the Year on the grounds that "the 'Word of the Year' should be a word." Allow me to provide a counterpoint to this view.

First, full disclosure. In January, at the most recent meeting of the American Dialect Society, I was named the chair of the New Words Committee, and in this capacity I preside over the selection of the ADS Word of the Year (working closely with old hands at the WOTY game like ADS executive secretary Allan Metcalf and vice president for communications and technology Grant Barrett). I also now edit the "Among the New Words" feature in American Speech, the quarterly journal of the ADS, which covers neologisms of all sorts, WOTY nominees included. (See the Summer 2011 installment for a roundup of last year's nominees, including the winner app and the runner-up nom.) Further disclosure: before my current job as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, I was editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and was responsible for overseeing the New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year — in 2007, for example, we selected locavore.

All things being equal, I do generally prefer that a "Word of the Year" be what is generally recognized as a word: that is, a single written unit like locavore, app, or nom. For starters, such selections are a lot easier to explain to the general public. As Jesse Sheidlower wrote in his recap of the 2004 ADS WOTY selection for Slate, "It's not actually 'Word' of the Year; it can be a compound, phrase, prefix, or so forth, but we know we can't get away with promoting a 'Lexical Item' of the Year." But whether it is the ADS or a dictionary program like Oxford's making the choice, lexical items are indeed what should properly be considered, even if those items form compounds or phrases.

I agree with Geoff that the press release from Oxford Dictionaries erred in explaining squeezed middle as a compound. Nonetheless, I think that a compositional phrase can be sufficiently lexicalized for consideration as Word of the Year — especially when a dictionary is making the selection. Though Geoff argues that it's "ridiculous to think of putting this in a dictionary," dictionaries from the OED on down are in fact full of such phrases. Sometimes they are lemmatized separately, and sometimes they appear in so-called "run-on entries" — so that an ADJ-N phrase can be found under the head noun. (Not just any phrase will do, of course: to be considered for inclusion, it has to achieve sufficient prominence and distinctiveness in common usage, which is not the case for such collocations as "anglophone parts of it," mentioned by Geoff in his post.)

Consider, for instance, the ADS 2004 WOTY selection, which was not just one such phrase but three: red state, blue state, and purple state, as used in US political geography (see my historical explanation here). The latest dictionary editions from American Heritage and Oxford include red state and blue state as headwords (with American Heritage adding purple state) — and why shouldn't they? Such political phrases can be "compositional" while still being invested with special new meanings that lexicographers would rightly want to document. Squeezed middle would appear to fit that class. (I think it's an odd WOTY choice for other reasons — especially the fact that Oxford's UK and US dictionary programs decided to make this a joint transatlantic selection. The press release says that "the Word of the Year committee in the US felt [squeezed middle] had good resonance in the US, as well," but I have yet to discern such resonance on this side of the pond, in a year dominated by such words as occupy.)

The nomination and selection process for ADS WOTY is a democratic one, with all those in attendance at the annual meeting encouraged to vote and make their voices heard. I am pleased to learn that Geoff will be making his inimitable voice heard at our January proceedings in Portland, and if he would like to lead a non-phrasal brigade he is more than welcome to. But I don't expect the lexicographers in the room to agree with him.

November 23, 2011 @ 8:40 am · Filed by Ben Zimmer under Words words words

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引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 05:30

The "Word of the Year" should be a wordNovember 23, 2011 @ 6:02 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and politics, Words words words

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The Oxford Dictionaries organization (responsible for marketing the Oxford English Dictionary and its many spinoffs and abridgments) picks a word at the end of each year that they think epitomizes the main currents of what happened in the world (or the anglophone parts of it). Or to be more accurate, they pick either a word or a phrase. And two years running they have picked phrases. I want to argue that this is a mistake, not just because they have chosen an utterly undistinguished item, but because what they have chosen is a straightforwardly compositional phrase, one that couldn't be argued to be a lexical item at all.
Words are coined, relatively rarely — there may be hundreds that catch on in a year, but relative to how many words are spoken and written each day that is minuscule. Phrases, on the other hand, are composed on the fly every second. There are so many of them that it is impossible for most of them to occur frequently. For a concrete example, I just looked back at what I've already written, and picked out "anglophone parts of it". Google comes up with just one web hit for it: a contributor called Jotun used it on this history discussion site. And that's it, apart from one Google Books hit from the Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean literature, 1900-2003. It's breakfast time in Edinburgh, and already I've come within two instances of creating a phrase never recorded before. You've probably used a phrase today that never occurred before in the history of the world (I don't know; I wasn't with you the whole time, but you were always there in the room).

What the OED people have chosen for this year (reported here) is squeezed middle. Yes, a UK Labour Party politician's feeble phrase for denoting an allegedly squeezed and put-upon class trapped in between the welfare riff-raff below (well taken care of with luxury soup kitchens and lavish handouts of cash, as is well known) and the fat-cat billionaires above. This is, first, a tired political cliché, plugged recently by Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party in the UK parliament, designed by spin doctors and speechwriters to make everyone think that they are part of the squeezed middle and thus incline them toward the sympathetic pol who is using the phrase to oil them up for voting. (After typing "oil them up for voting" I decided to google it, by the way, and found that it has never appeared on the web before.)

But my real objection is not to the feebleness and blatantly political origin of this phrase (which ordinary people are simply not using), but to the fact that it is fully compositional: squeezed just means "squeezed", and middle just means "middle", and if you put the two together you have the literal meaning. It is ridiculous to think of putting this in a dictionary — as opposed to a collection of political phraseology and cliché.

Oxford University Press has defended itself against such charges by issuing this FAQ response: "From a dictionary-maker's point of view, a two-word expression is called a 'compound' and is treated as one word [a 'headword'] in the dictionary." Nonsense. This is not a compound. It is an ordinary nominal with a participle functioning as attributive modifier of a noun. OUP needs a competent in-house grammarian. (See Chapter 19 of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language for an accurate account of the types of compound in English.)

OUP also points out (as if in justification) that it has done this before: last year its "word of the year" was big society. Another phrase invented by political advisers — UK prime minister David Cameron's term for a society with what George H. W. Bush called a thousand points of light (i.e., private donors who will fund the soup kitchens). Again, despite the specialized political context of use and the attempt to create a buzz, big just means "big", as in big-hearted (though that actually is a compound). It is truly ridiculous to cite an earlier error as a precedent that legitimates the new error.

The word of the year should be a word. That shouldn't be such a radical idea, should it? There are plenty to choose from. The American Dialect Society will be choosing from among them when it selects its word of the year for 2011 at its annual meeting, co-located with the meeting of the Linguistic Society of American in Portland, Oregon, 5-8 January 2012. I will be there, and will try to prevent compositional phrases from being picked.


[Comments are closed. Just one more injustice for the squeezed middle.]


November 23, 2011 @ 6:02 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and politics, Words words words

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引用 echo.chan 2011-12-28 10:27

But WOTY season does give us a bit of time to talk about what a "word" is.
不过，“年度词汇”季并未给予我们一些时间来讨论什么是“词”。
does 是强调的作用，a bit 还是肯定的，不等于little吧？

引用 migmig 2011-12-28 11:11

本帖最后由 migmig 于 2011-12-28 11:11 编辑

yannanchen 发表于 2011-12-28 05:12
tittilate.？？？

titillate

tittilate这个单词 查不出来啊，当时google的时候，建议是
titillate。
现在看，可能是tittle的动词化。

引用 西米 2011-12-28 12:42

本帖最后由 西米 于 2011-12-28 17:06 编辑

gift return.
在西方，由于节日期间收到大量用不着或不感冒的礼物，节日之后到商店退货或换货是一个非常通行的事情。这被称为“gift return”。下面的引文来自一篇专门谈如何在节后return gift的文章：

“You see, sometime between Santa's chimney excursion and the final whistle of the holiday football games, Christmas cheer can evolve into gift-return panic. So that you can get what you wish for after the big day — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Solstice — here's my nine-point plan for successful holiday gift returns.”（原文见：http://www.aarp.org/money/budget ... _happy_returns.html）

引用 jackman 2011-12-28 18:35

hao

引用 yannanchen 2011-12-28 20:37

原文我查了一下，titillate的拼写错了，这个词的意思是瘙痒，激起....兴趣

引用 Dezazer 2011-12-29 20:30

（1）
gift return

是“还礼”的意思吗？

（2）
忒容易

总觉得后面没有个“了”字有点别扭。 ^_^

（3）
低期望则多开心

“多开心”感觉有点怪~~

整句是不是可以这样理解“期望越低往往玩得越开心”？

（4）
这也是那种时刻，辞典的撰写者和编撰者们开始挑选年度词汇

“时刻”是一个“时间点”，感觉稍微有点“短”。

“这也是辞典的撰写和编撰者们开始挑选年度词汇的时候”？

（5）
top political catchphrase

lz原译：排在前列的政治标语

“最热门的政治词汇”？

（6）
I'll do a good turn
lz原译：我将做件好事

“我就借花献佛”或者“那我就送个顺水人情”？

引用 lily_scent 2011-12-30 16:50

本帖最后由 lily_scent 于 2011-12-30 16:54 编辑

I'm not a ... person...译为 “热衷于。。”
I'm not a tea person 我不喜欢喝茶是一个道理。因为如果翻译成“炮制。。的主儿”好像说的是年度词汇是作者选出的。但作者要致歉的意思我认为并不是原译文表达的“我不是制造这些词的主儿，所以要向他们致歉”
而应该是“我并不热衷这些选出的年度词汇，要向那些造年度词汇的专家们致歉”而原因是后面说的"winners seldom tittilate" 是因为选出来的词我都不感冒。

所以我觉得整理的译文可能是
我承认既不热衷于'今日一词’，也不热衷于‘风云词汇’（年度一词也可，就是联想“the person of the year'的标准翻译是风云人物），再此对***脱帽致歉。我个人对此不感兴趣，仅仅因为选出的词很少触动我。

请多多指教啊。^_^

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