词汇大师(Wordmaster)--'Your Own Words' by Barbara Wallraf

Broadcast on COAST TO COAST: May 13, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- we talk to language columnist¹ and author Barbara Wallraff about her new book. It's called "Your Own Words." In it, she explains, quote, "how to outsmart the reference books and be your own language expert."

And Barbara Wallraff says one of the best ways to do that is with an Internet search engine like ...

WALLRAFF: "Google in particular -- and some of the other ones are starting to have this too -- but Google in particular has a feature called Google News. Everything on Google News is some kind of edited medium. It might be a Web site for a newspaper with the stories from the newspaper. Or a television Web site. Thousands of edited media Web sites are searchable for even little words or phrases.

"So if you're trying to decide whether -- if you're trying to figure out what the word 'phishing' spelled with a p-h at the beginning means, that's one of the examples of a new term that you can go look on Google News and you'll find a bunch of newspaper articles that will mention phishing and, because it's a new term, will tell you what it means."

AA: "And please explain it."

WALLRAFF: "Phishing is a form of e-mail scam. People will send an e-mail that pretends to be from something like PayPal or eBay or your bank, and it'll try to look official and it'll say 'oh sorry, we lost your credit card information and your social security number. Could you just give it to us again?'"

RS: "Who sets the standards, though? How do you know what you're getting is correct?"

WALLRAFF: "Well, this Internet method of looking things up that I'm talking about is particularly good for new words, because when I turned in the manuscript of my book, which was right around the beginning of the year, 'phishing' every time you saw it was glossed². Language people call it glossing³ when the word is defined. When you say phishing, you say 'comma, an e-mail scam that ... ' so on and so forth⁴. Every time you saw phishing last year, it was glossed.

"Now if you go look on Google News, and it gives you just the last month's worth of citations⁵, I think the majority of citations -- or at least when I last looked the majority of citations were not glossed. So that's an interesting fact, that it's becoming well enough known that people are beginning to be comfortable using that word, expecting people they say it to to know what they mean.

"If all the citations that you see are from very specialized⁶ publications, that tells you something. That tells you it's not in the mainstream⁷. There was a business expression a few years ago: 'put the moose on the table.' And somebody wrote me and said, what in the heck does that mean. I would have no idea how to find out what 'put the moose on the table' meant if it weren't for the Internet.

"You need to put quotation⁸ marks around a phrase. Otherwise you'll get all of the articles that contain 'put' somewhere in them and 'table' and 'moose' someplace in the article. But when I called that up, I got a magazine article explaining that a man whose name I now forget had been the CEO [chief executive officer] of a company, and it was his way of saying, let's talk about some uncomfortable truth that we're not acknowledging."

RS: "What would you hope readers to your book take away from it."

WALLRAFF: "A lot of people think what's in their head about language is right, and they haven't necessarily examined that in depth. If you begin to study, if you begin to think 'how do I know that, do I really know that?' you may find that there are things you don't know. But you'll also find you can know the answers to just about any question. And often -- more often than you'd like -- the answer is 'it depends.' Or 'that's up to you, here's the range of respectable opinion.' But you don't want to be somebody saying 'well, it's got to be done this way, this word is wrong, wrong, wrong,' when it's not."

AA: Barbara Wallraff writes a language column in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and she's just written a book called "Your Own Words." That's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is。。。。。。。。。。。。And you can find all of our segments archived at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "Free"/Phish

 

1 columnist   

n.专栏作家

参考例句：

• The host was interviewing a local columnist.节目主持人正在同一位当地的专栏作家交谈。
• She's a columnist for USA Today.她是《今日美国报》的专栏作家。

2 glossed   

v.注解( gloss的过去式和过去分词 )；掩饰（错误）；粉饰；把…搪塞过去

参考例句：

• The manager glossed over the team's recent defeat. 经理对这个队最近的失败闪烁其词。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He glossed over his selfishness with a display of generosity. 他以慷慨大方的假象掩饰他的自私。 来自互联网

3 glossing   

v.注解( gloss的现在分词 )；掩饰（错误）；粉饰；把…搪塞过去

参考例句：

• The rights and wrongs in any controversy should be clarified without compromise or glossing over. 有争论的问题，要把是非弄明白，不要调和敷衍。 来自互联网

4 forth   

adv.向前；向外，往外

参考例句：

• The wind moved the trees gently back and forth.风吹得树轻轻地来回摇晃。
• He gave forth a series of works in rapid succession.他很快连续发表了一系列的作品。

5 citations   

n.引用( citation的名词复数 )；引证；引文；表扬

参考例句：

• The apt citations and poetic gems have adorned his speeches. 贴切的引语和珠玑般的诗句为他的演说词增添文采。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• Some dictionary writers use citations to show what words mean. 有些辞典的编纂者用引文作例证以解释词义。 来自辞典例句

6 specialized   

adj.专门的，专业化的

参考例句：

• There are many specialized agencies in the United Nations.联合国有许多专门机构。
• These tools are very specialized.这些是专用工具。

7 mainstream   

n.（思想或行为的）主流；adj.主流的

参考例句：

• Their views lie outside the mainstream of current medical opinion.他们的观点不属于当今医学界观点的主流。
• Polls are still largely reflects the mainstream sentiment.民调还在很大程度上反映了社会主流情绪。

8 quotation   

n.引文，引语，语录；报价，牌价，行情

参考例句：

• He finished his speech with a quotation from Shakespeare.他讲话结束时引用了莎士比亚的语录。
• The quotation is omitted here.此处引文从略。