英语单词大师：About Slang

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

RS: "How do you hope that readers use this dictionary?"TOM DALZELL: "There is the traditional role of the dictionary: 'I don't know what this word that I heard or I read means, I'll look it up.' But it's a browsing² pleasure, because when you start seeing clusters of words that come out of the Caribbean, there's just such hope and joy of life there. And then you see a skepticism and irony³ in Australia. You see different cultures emerging as you browse⁴ through it."AA: "Speaking of changes in attitude or culture, or cultural differences, I'm curious since you've looked at -- let's just focus on American slang for a moment here -- you've looked at slang from nineteen forty-five to the present. Have you seen any shifts in attitude or in the culture as expressed through the slang?"RS: "Or trends."TOM DALZELL: "Sure, sure. I've seen two things. One is homogenization of American slang. If you looked in nineteen forty-five, you would find very different slang in the cities and in rural areas. And there's a lot more uniformity now, and I attribute that to media. With young people, with the advent⁵ of MTV in the early eighties, that really became a national media outlet⁶ for language. So I've seen homogenization, and there's something lost in that.

"And the other thing that one sees, beginning in the late nineteen thirties but certainly continuing on almost a linear way up is the influence of African-American vernacular⁷, African-American slang on American slang in general. With the Swing movement and jitterbugs in the late thirties, there was a conscious attempt by white Americans to learn African-American slang, and it has just become more and more a part of mainstream⁸ American slang."RS: Tom Dalzell is a labor⁹ lawyer, but when he's not doing that, his labor of love is writing about slang. We asked him if he found any terms that are especially difficult for non-native English speakers to understand.

TOM DALZELL: "Well, even among English-as-first-language speakers, there's a great deal of vagueness in slang -- intentionally¹⁰. When you say 'Well, we hooked up,' that could mean anything from 'We just happened to meet each other at a club and talked' to romantic involvement. I mean, there's a wonderful scene in [the movie] 'Pulp¹¹ Fiction' when Vincent Vega tells the Samuel Jackson character that Marcellus wants him to take out Uma Thurman. Take out, as in kill? Or as in, to take out on a date? There's a lot of vagueness and sometimes context doesn't even suggest the answer."AA: "Do you run into any uses of slang that confuse you or other lawyers or judges?"TOM DALZELL: "Well, actually, I'm testifying as an expert witness up in a murder trial in Spokane [Washington] in early December about a slang term, where the prosecuting¹² attorney deemed it to mean only one thing and the defense¹³ is arguing that it could mean many things."RS: "What is that word?"TOM DALZELL: "The term is to 'hit a lick.' The defendant¹⁴ told several friends that he had 'hit a lick,' and the prosecutor¹⁵ is urging that the only possible definition of that term is to commit an armed robbery. My research tells me otherwise, that 'hit a lick' actually more commonly means to come into a sum of money, in somewhat shady circumstances, but in one fell swoop¹⁶ and by no means necessarily armed robbery. And here somebody's life depends on how a jury is going to interpret him saying 'I hit a lick.'

RS: Tom Dalzell, senior editor of the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. The two-volume set is being republished in a concise form without the citations¹⁷ and with new entries from around the English-speaking word.

AA: And that's WORDMASTER for this week. To learn more about American English, we invite you to browse through the archives at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is [email protected]. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

分享到：