词汇大师-- Remembering William Safire

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and this week on WORDMASTER: We remember William Safire, who died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79.
RS: Readers of the New York Times knew him not only from his years as a conservative political columnist¹, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in print journalism². He was also a linguistic³ pundit⁴ who wrote the "On Language" column in the Times' Sunday magazine.
AA: He dealt with topics like word origins, usage, new terms and old terms with new meanings. He was also a novelist and editor of Safire's Political Dictionary. Our colleague Adam Phillips interviewed him last year during the presidential election campaign.
RS: One of the terms they discussed was a phrase that William Safire himself wrote during his days as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and his vice⁵ president Spiro Agnew.

　　WILLIAM SAFIRE: "I was looking for some criticism of people who were defeatist, who thought that we could never win in Vietnam. And so I came up with the nattering nabobs of negativism. That is known as red meat rhetoric⁶. When you talk about 'There's no red meat in this speech,' that means there's no ammunition⁷ that you can feed to your supporters to use, or throw into the cage of a lion that was hungry.
"Politicians have to use metaphors⁸ and similes⁹ and word pictures and figures of speech in order to capture attention and encapsulate an idea or a vague program that otherwise would put people to sleep. So they have to say 'I'm gonna offer you a New Deal' or 'take you to a New Frontier' -- I've just quoted [Franklin] Roosevelt and [John] Kennedy - or suggest a New Covenant¹⁰. Now that was suggested by Bill Clinton and it didn't fly for some reason. You never really know when the political language is going to work or when it's gonna lay an egg.
ADAM PHILLIPS: "So political speech then has two functions. One is to draw attention to oneself as a politician, so that people sit up and pay attention, and the other is to explain a complicated idea in a shorthand form."
WILLIAM SAFIRE: "Shorthand is very important in political language. For example, a word that's flying around now is superdelegate. We used to call them party elders or, before that, party bosses. The fun of the political language is to stop and say 'What am I saying? Does it have the right overtones, the right coloration?' When we talk about superdelegates, there is a sinister¹¹ quality to 'superdelegates,' because it suggests some delegates are subdelegates, or not as important."
APS: William Safire has often pointed¹² out that political speech is always changing. New words and phrases get created, and older ones attain¹³ new relevance¹⁴. He gives the phrase fire in the belly¹⁵ as one example.
WILLIAM SAFIRE: "A candidate has to have ambition and a real burning desire to become whatever he's running for. And that's called fire in the belly. And it was a problem that Barack Obama had, because he was essentially¹⁶ cool, intellectual. He actually talked in paragraphs. So there was a feeling that he didn't have fire in the belly. He recognized that and worked out a phrase that had a resonance¹⁷ in the black community, because it was used by the National Association for the Advancement¹⁸ of Colored People. 'Are you fired up? Are you ready to go?' And they would shout back 'Ready to go!' And that gave the feeling that, indeed, he had fire in the belly.
"You've got to remember that the most important thing about political language is its vividness, it's calling up of an image in your mind. In the nineteen thirties, someone who left under great criticism, it was said that he left in a hail of dead cats. You can envision a cartoon really of a man running with cats being thrown at him.
"And economists¹⁹, political economists, also came up with a feline²⁰ image. Cat lovers don't like this phrase, but when the stock market goes down and down and down, and then comes back up a little, they call that a dead cat bounce. When a cat hits the ground and bounces back, it doesn't mean it's alive, it just means that was what we'd call a sucker rally.
AP: "There's another one, right?"
WILLIAM SAFIRE: "I do that unconsciously, I guess."
AP: "I guess we all do. That's how come we know they're really words."
WILLIAM SAFIRE: "Well, you know they're really words if you look them up in the Political Dictionary."
AA: William Safire, editor of Safire's Political Dictionary, language columnist for the New York Times and former White House speechwriter, died Sunday at age 79.
RS: You can find more of that interview from last year with VOA's Adam Phillips at voanews.com/wordmaster. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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 journalism   

n.新闻工作，报业

参考例句：

• He's a teacher but he does some journalism on the side.他是教师，可还兼职做一些新闻工作。
• He had an aptitude for journalism.他有从事新闻工作的才能。

3 linguistic   

adj.语言的，语言学的

参考例句：

• She is pursuing her linguistic researches.她在从事语言学的研究。
• The ability to write is a supreme test of linguistic competence.写作能力是对语言能力的最高形式的测试。

4 pundit   

n.博学之人；权威

参考例句：

• Even the outstanding excellent graduate will learn constantly if he likes to be a pundit.即使最优秀的结业生，要想成为一个博学的人也要不断地研究。
• He is a well known political pundit.他是一个著名的政治专家。

5 vice   

n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的

参考例句：

• He guarded himself against vice.他避免染上坏习惯。
• They are sunk in the depth of vice.他们堕入了罪恶的深渊。

6 rhetoric   

n.修辞学，浮夸之言语

参考例句：

• Do you know something about rhetoric?你懂点修辞学吗？
• Behind all the rhetoric,his relations with the army are dangerously poised.在冠冕堂皇的言辞背后，他和军队的关系岌岌可危。

7 ammunition   

n.军火，弹药

参考例句：

• A few of the jeeps had run out of ammunition.几辆吉普车上的弹药已经用光了。
• They have expended all their ammunition.他们把弹药用光。

8 metaphors   

隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• I can only represent it to you by metaphors. 我只能用隐喻来向你描述它。
• Thus, She's an angel and He's a lion in battle are metaphors. 因此她是天使，他是雄狮都是比喻说法。

9 similes   

（使用like或as等词语的）明喻( simile的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Similes usually start with "like" or "as". 明喻通常以like或as开头。
• All similes and allegories concerning her began and ended with birds. 要比仿她，要模拟她，总得以鸟类始，还得以鸟类终。

10 covenant   

n.盟约，契约；v.订盟约

参考例句：

• They refused to covenant with my father for the property.他们不愿与我父亲订立财产契约。
• The money was given to us by deed of covenant.这笔钱是根据契约书付给我们的。

11 sinister   

adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的

参考例句：

• There is something sinister at the back of that series of crimes.在这一系列罪行背后有险恶的阴谋。
• Their proposals are all worthless and designed out of sinister motives.他们的建议不仅一钱不值，而且包藏祸心。

12 pointed   

adj.尖的，直截了当的

参考例句：

• He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔。
• She wished to show Mrs.John Dashwood by this pointed invitation to her brother.她想通过对达茨伍德夫人提出直截了当的邀请向她的哥哥表示出来。

13 attain   

vt.达到，获得，完成

参考例句：

• I used the scientific method to attain this end. 我用科学的方法来达到这一目的。
• His painstaking to attain his goal in life is praiseworthy. 他为实现人生目标所下的苦功是值得称赞的。

14 relevance   

n.中肯，适当，关联，相关性

参考例句：

• Politicians' private lives have no relevance to their public roles.政治家的私生活与他们的公众角色不相关。
• Her ideas have lost all relevance to the modern world.她的想法与现代社会完全脱节。

15 belly   

n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛

参考例句：

• The boss has a large belly.老板大腹便便。
• His eyes are bigger than his belly.他眼馋肚饱。

16 essentially   

adv.本质上，实质上，基本上

参考例句：

• Really great men are essentially modest.真正的伟人大都很谦虚。
• She is an essentially selfish person.她本质上是个自私自利的人。

17 resonance   

n.洪亮；共鸣；共振

参考例句：

• Playing the piano sets up resonance in those glass ornaments.一弹钢琴那些玻璃饰物就会产生共振。
• The areas under the two resonance envelopes are unequal.两个共振峰下面的面积是不相等的。

18 advancement   

n.前进，促进，提升

参考例句：

• His new contribution to the advancement of physiology was well appreciated.他对生理学发展的新贡献获得高度赞赏。
• The aim of a university should be the advancement of learning.大学的目标应是促进学术。

19 economists   

n.经济学家，经济专家( economist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The sudden rise in share prices has confounded economists. 股价的突然上涨使经济学家大惑不解。
• Foreign bankers and economists cautiously welcomed the minister's initiative. 外国银行家和经济学家对部长的倡议反应谨慎。 来自《简明英汉词典》

20 feline   

adj.猫科的

参考例句：

• As a result,humans have learned to respect feline independence.结果是人们已经学会尊重猫的独立性。
• The awakening was almost feline in its stealthiness.这种醒觉，简直和猫的脚步一样地轻悄。