词汇大师--Have the Rules of English Changed

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Our guest is English professor Jack¹ Lynch, author of the new book "The Lexicographer's Dilemma²."
RS: "Why did you write this book?"

　　JACK LYNCH: "Well, because I have a number of guides to grammar and style and things like that on the World Wide Web, I get messages from strangers all the time, asking me various grammatical and stylistic questions. But one came up in many variations many times, and it always took the form 'When I was in school, I was taught such-and-such and now I hear so-and-so. Have the rules changed?'
"And I realized I don't even know how to begin answering that, because the rules of the language aren't some official set of guidelines that are voted on by a committee or something like that. It's more an organic set of habits and superstitions³ and prejudices that all come together into the collective practices of the group."
RS: "The subtitle⁴ of your book is 'The Evolution of "Proper" English from Shakespeare to "South Park."' And proper is in quotes."
JACK LYNCH: "Yes."
RS: "Why did you put that in quotes?"
JACK LYNCH: "In fact, I wrestled⁵ with my editors a little bit because I had many more quotations⁶ around proper and correct throughout the book, and they said 'Can we do it in just a few strategic places and remove the rest?'"
AA: "You're trying to be sarcastic⁷, obviously."
JACK LYNCH: "Well, not necessarily sarcastic. But I want people to understand that when we talk about 'proper' English, we're really talking about one variety of English. It's a very important variety of English. It's the one that gives you access to the corridors of power, and it's the way you make money and so on.
"You have to learn a variety of English. But the mistake is assuming that that is the only correct English and any departure from it is wrong. And I wanted people to understand there are many Englishes, and the rules that we use to distinguish among the different kinds of English aren't like rules of gravity or even laws against murder or something like this. They're more like table manners or fashion. They are just sets of conventions that are shared by a group of people."
AA: "And widely criticized, right, in all three cases? Manners and fashion."
JACK LYNCH: "Well, criticized, but also argued over. At least with manners and so on, table manners and so on, we recognize that what we're doing is a social convention and we all agree to behave this way."
RS: "Where did that start?"
JACK LYNCH: "People have been speaking something we can call English for about fifteen hundred years. Now, fifteen hundred years ago it sounded nothing like modern English. It would sound a lot more like German to a modern speaker. For the first thousand years, the first maybe twelve hundred years of the language's history, no one was particularly upset about how the majority of people spoke⁸.
"Now, everyone's recognized some people speak better than others, just as some people dress better than others and dance and sing better than others. But there was no sense that most people don't know their own language. It was only around the year seventeen hundred that people began getting concerned about that and began instituting rules for the way everyone must speak. And that's the story I try to tell, from about seventeen hundred to the present."
AA: "Now before we get that, I'm curious, I mean how does this compare to other languages out there?"
JACK LYNCH: "Well, some languages have never been bothered with this sort of thing at all. They don't have any systematic⁹ sense of what's official. But many of the major European languages have gone much further than English in that there are official, government-sponsored academies that determine what the proper form of the language is. There's nothing like that in any English-speaking country."
RS: "Well, how do you account for, then, the changes in culture and language that come into a language, no matter what language it is?"
JACK LYNCH: "Well, every language changes all the time. That's simply a fact of life and you can like that or you can be upset about it, but you have to accept it. Language always changes. Every language has always changed. When scholars in the seventeenth century started looking back at Latin and Greek, they thought 'Ah, these are the perfect, unchanging languages, and our modern barbarous English must be degenerate¹⁰ because it's changing all the time.'
"Well, the only reason Latin and Greek seemed to be constant is because moderns just didn't have enough information about it. We now know Latin and Greek changed just as much as every language. They always change and trying to figure out the reasons is close to impossible. When you ask about any particular example, linguists¹¹ will often say 'historical reasons,' which is just an elaborate way of saying 'It just is, that's all.'"
AA: Jack Lynch is an English professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey¹². Next week he explains just what he means by the title of his latest book, "The Lexicographer's Dilemma."
RS: And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

1 jack   

n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克

参考例句：

• I am looking for the headphone jack.我正在找寻头戴式耳机插孔。
• He lifted the car with a jack to change the flat tyre.他用千斤顶把车顶起来换下瘪轮胎。

2 dilemma   

n.困境，进退两难的局面

参考例句：

• I am on the horns of a dilemma about the matter.这件事使我进退两难。
• He was thrown into a dilemma.他陷入困境。

3 superstitions   

迷信，迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Old superstitions seem incredible to educated people. 旧的迷信对于受过教育的人来说是不可思议的。
• Do away with all fetishes and superstitions. 破除一切盲目崇拜和迷信。

4 subtitle   

n.副题（书本中的），说明对白的字幕

参考例句：

• His new book has a subtitle.他的新书有一个副标题。
• Ah!I don't know why they don't subtitle these movies.唉！我不知道这些电影为什么不打字幕。

5 wrestled   

v.（与某人）搏斗( wrestle的过去式和过去分词 )；扭成一团；扭打；（与…）摔跤

参考例句：

• As a boy he had boxed and wrestled. 他小的时候又是打拳又是摔跤。
• Armed guards wrestled with the intruder. 武装警卫和闯入者扭打起来。 来自《简明英汉词典》

6 quotations   

n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价

参考例句：

• The insurance company requires three quotations for repairs to the car. 保险公司要修理这辆汽车的三家修理厂的报价单。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• These quotations cannot readily be traced to their sources. 这些引语很难查出出自何处。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

7 sarcastic   

adj.讥讽的，讽刺的，嘲弄的

参考例句：

• I squashed him with a sarcastic remark.我说了一句讽刺的话把他给镇住了。
• She poked fun at people's shortcomings with sarcastic remarks.她冷嘲热讽地拿别人的缺点开玩笑。

8 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

9 systematic   

adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的

参考例句：

• The way he works isn't very systematic.他的工作不是很有条理。
• The teacher made a systematic work of teaching.这个教师进行系统的教学工作。

10 degenerate   

v.退步，堕落；adj.退步的，堕落的；n.堕落者

参考例句：

• He didn't let riches and luxury make him degenerate.他不因财富和奢华而自甘堕落。
• Will too much freedom make them degenerate?太多的自由会令他们堕落吗？

11 linguists   

n.通晓数国语言的人( linguist的名词复数 )；语言学家

参考例句：

• The linguists went to study tribal languages in the field. 语言学家们去实地研究部落语言了。 来自辞典例句
• The linguists' main interest has been to analyze and describe languages. 语言学家的主要兴趣一直在于分析并描述语言。 来自辞典例句

12 jersey   

n.运动衫

参考例句：

• He wears a cotton jersey when he plays football.他穿运动衫踢足球。
• They were dressed alike in blue jersey and knickers.他们穿着一致，都是蓝色的运动衫和灯笼短裤。