In a Manner of Speaking
不妨这么讲
One of the most startling surprises for many Americans when they first arrive in Britain is the discovery that their mother tongue, which has been serving them faithfully all these years, is suddenly not up to dealing with the intricacies of the English language as practiced in the British Isles.
对于第一次到英国的许多美国人而言，最让他们惊讶的事情之一就是多年来他们运用自如的母语在应对大不列颠岛屿上使用的纷繁复杂的英语时，突然显得力不从心。
It is an unsettling experience to arrive in the UK and find oneself uttering vocal noises -- speech is probably too strong a word for it -- that are received nearly everywhere as at best quaint and imprecise, at worst as misleading and noisy. Even the most innocuous encounters suddenly become charged with the possibility of confusion.
到了英国之后，你会发现自己所发出的有声噪音（或许用言语这一词过重了些）在任何地方，往好处讲被看作是优雅而又精确的，往坏处讲成了喧闹的骗人的鬼话。即使最平淡无奇的遭遇也会顿时使人迷惑不解。
I recall once, when I was still new to the country, arriving at a country pub at lunchtime and asking what sandwiches they had, \"We have roast beef,\" said the man behind the bar, bending over to consult a small glass case full of sandwiches,
\"and we have ham and cheese.\"
当我初到这个国家时，记得有一次，午饭时间我到了一家乡村酒吧，我问他们有什么样的三明治，“我们这儿有烧牛肉。”吧台后的人一边回答，一边弯着腰去看一个盛满各式各样三明治的玻璃盒子，“还有火腿和奶酪。”
\"I'11 have ham and cheese,\" I decided.
“我就要火腿和奶酪”我说。
The man looked at me as if I had misunderstood him. \"We have roast beef and we have ham and cheese,\" he repeated, but more slowly.
那个人看着我，好像是我误解了他的意思：“我们有烧牛肉、火腿和奶酪”他用更慢的速度重复了一遍。
\"Yes,\" I agreed. I was with him this far.
“是的”。我回答，他的话我都能理解。
\"So which will it be?\"
“那么你要点什么？”
\"Ham and cheese,\" I replied with a small sense of foreboding.
“我就要火腿和奶酪。”我预感到我们之间有些误解。
He looked at me as if wondering if I was a wise guy. \"You want one of each?\"
他盯着我，好像在思量我是不是在故意找麻烦，“你一样要一个？”
\"No, just the one.\"
“不，只要一个。”
His face, I noticed, was growing slightly red around the edges. \"Yes, but which one?\"
“好的，但是哪一个呢？”我发现他的脸颊有些泛红。
\"The one I just said,\" I replied with the uneasy steadiness of someone forced unexpectedly to stand his ground.
“我说的那个。”我很不自在地回答。
Eventually, he brought me a plate with two sandwiches, one ham and one cheese. Only later did I discover that it was unknown, at least in those days, to combine ham and cheese in a single English sandwich. (Too tasty, probably.)
最后，他给我端上了一盘午餐，包括两个三明治，一只火腿和一片奶酪，直到后来我才发现在那个时候，他们不知道把火腿和奶酪放在一个简单的英式三明治里（或许尝起来
味道会很好）。
It was Oscar Wilde who said, \"The English have really everything in common
ve been
with the Americans, except, of course, language,\" and he couldn't hamore right. And the fault, if I may say so, is entirely theirs.
奥斯卡·王尔德说过：“除了语言，英国人实际上与美国人没有什么不同。”他的话太对了。在我看来，错误完全在于他们。
The British, you see, have always taken a quiet -- sometimes practically
unwitting -- pleasure in perplexìng foreigners, as anyone who has ever tried to follow a cricket match will know. It's why they take such delight in nonsense verse and off-the-wall humor, why they ha
ve a constitutional form of government but
no written constitution, why they celebrate the Queen' s birthday in June when she was actually born in April and why, above all, they created a language as ineffably illogical and idiosyncratic as English -- a tongue in which, need I remind you, \"ough\" can be pronounced in any of half a dozen ways (as in bough, thought, through, trough, though, and hiccough). God-be-with-you somehow has mutated into good-bye, and colonel is pronounced, without the faintest hint of self-consciousness or embarrasSΜent, as if it had an \"r\" in it.
你知道，英国人总是在迷惑外国人的过程中暗自取乐——有时是无意的，就像一个人试图要听懂板球比赛的讲解一样。这就是为什么人们从荒诞的诗文和疯癫的幽默中找乐，为什么他们有立宪制政
府却没有成文的宪
法。为什么他们在六
月庆祝女王生日，
而实际上她是在四月出生。总之，这就是为什么他们创造了英语这样一种毫无逻辑的怪癖
的语言的原因。我要提醒你的是，在这种语言中，ough可以有下列六种发音（如在bough，thought，through，trough，though，and hiccough）。God-be-with-you发成了good-bye，colonel这个词会被自然而然添入了“r”的发音。
Now you might think that as native speakers of the same language we would have a certain advantage in interpreting English, but no. As soon as the British realized, to their presumed horror, that they had spawned a nation across the sea where the inhabitants could also speak English, they immediately began doing all they could to distance themselves linguistically from their colonial offspring. They started pronouncing lieutenant as \"lefftenant,\" tomato as \"tomahto,\" and waistcoat as \"wesskit,\" among much else. (Most Britons think they have been talking like that forever, but in fact many, perhaps most, of the distinguishing characteristics of British English date only from the late 1700s and early 1800s. If you were to resurrect, say, King George III, he would almost certainly sound more American than British.)
现在你可能会认为作为讲同一种语言的人在解释英式英语方面我们会有优势，那你就错了。当英国人惊恐地发现他们在大洋彼岸开辟的土地上，当地人也说英语，他们便立即尽可能从语言上远离他们殖民地的后代，他们开始将“lieutenant”发成“lefftenant”，“tomato”发成“tomahto”，“waistcoat”发成“weskit”，等等。（大多数英国人认为他们一直都是那样说话的，但实际上许多甚至大多数英式英语中的显著特征只是出现在18世纪晚期到19世纪早期。假使你让乔治国王复活，他说话的语调一定会更美式化了。）
They started calling the upstairs floor the first floor rather than the second floor, thus ensuring that North American visitors would spend long, bewildered
hours hunting for their hotel room, and pretended not to understand what we meant when we referred to the autumn as fall or used words like gotten, skillet, and restroom. They made sure that when we asked for pants or a vest in a clothing store we would be given unexpected items (namely underwear), just as a request for a biscuit or lemonade would summon forth, respectively, a cookie and a kind of warm, fizzy linctus that has never seen a lemon in its life (and which, with the best will in the world, only a Briton could find refreshing).
楼上那层为一楼而不是二楼，如此保证了北美来的游客迷迷糊糊花很多时间才会找到饭店房间。当我们用“fall”指秋天或用其他的单词如：gotten、skillet和restroom时，他们假装不明白我们的意思。当我们在服装店要看裤子或背心时，他们一定会拿给你一些莫名其妙的东西（即内衣），就像你点了一块面包干或柠檬汁后，他们会分别给你上一份饼干和一种发出嘶嘶声的热糖浆，与人毫不相干（全世界只有英国人表达好客的方式让人感到新鲜）。
Then, to make sure that our confusion was complete, they took to doing odd and unexpected things with their vowels and consonants, lopping whole syllables off words like library and necessary (making them \"libree\" and \"nessasree\"), dispensing with r's in a whimsical and inconsistent way, and speaking sometimes without moving their lips and sometimes through their nasal passages. In consequence, even the most attentive and experienced foreign listener will often find himself at least half a beat behind in almost any conversation. Only recently I had a long, confused, and ultimately surreal discussion with my English wife of 20 years in which, it turned out, she believed I was saying \"khaki\" while I was equally certain she was saying 'car key.' This would not have happened, as I pointed out to
her, had I married a girl from Peoria.
将我们搞得迷惑不解之后，他们便开始用奇怪的方式来发元音和辅音，比如：把“library”和“necessary”的整个音节砍去（发成“libree”和“nessasree”），或者莫名其妙地发出“r”的音，或者根本不动嘴唇而只用鼻腔发音。于是，即使最专注、最有经验的外国人在听对方谈话中时都会觉得慢了半拍。就在最近我和生活了20年的英国妻子进行了一次长时间混乱的，最终变得很离奇的讨论，在讨论中她认定我是在讲“黄卡其布”，而在我听来她是在指汽车钥匙。我告诉她，如果当年我娶了个皮奥里亚女孩，就不会发生这些事。
A once-popular guidebook called An Anglo-American Interpreter went so far as to suggest that \"an American, if taken suddenly ill while on a visit to London, might die in the street through being unable to make himself understood.\" I very much doubt that -- the British don't want us dead after all, merely muddled -- but it is certainly true that there are enough differences in vocabulary to make comprehension a constant challenge. According to a linguistic authority who took the trouble to make a tally, some 4,000 words in common usage have a different meaning in British English than in American English. That doesn't seem a terribly large number on the face of things, but it is sufficient to cause endless confusion, as an elderly American woman of my acquaintance discovered when she inquired of a passerby in London's Hyde Park if there was a restroom nearby. \"Oh, I don't think so, love,\" the passerby replied with sympathetic concern. \"But there's a bench just there where you can rest as long as you like.\" she added helpfully.
一本曾经流行的名为“一位英裔美国翻译”的指导书上讲道“如果一个美国人在去往
伦敦的途中，突然病倒，他或许会因语言不通而死在大街上，”我经常怀疑这点，英国人毕竟不愿我们死去，只是迷惑罢了，但由于词汇的不同不断给我们的理解带来的挑战是客观存在的。根据一语言机构努力得出的计算结果，英式英语中大约有4000个常用单词有着不同于美式英语的含义。表面上看这或许算不了什么，但这足以不断引起困惑。我一位熟人的美国太太在伦敦海德公园问一过路人附近有没有厕所，那位行人关切地回答：“对不起，我想没有，但那边儿有一长椅，你可以在那儿多休息一会儿。”她热心地向老妇人解释。
The telling feature of all this is that wherever meanings differ between the two countries, the American expression is nearly always, in at least some degree, self-explanatory. Even if you had never been in the United States, you could make a game stab at figuring out what was meant by sidewalk, doghouse, ground beef, bedspread, eggplant, baby carriage, and garbage truck. The British equivalents --namely, pavement, kennel, mince, counterpane, aubergine, pram, and dust cart-- offer no hint of their meaning.
所有这些可以说明，只要两个国家存在意义上的不同，美式的表达往往至少在一定程度上会有一定的自我解释，即使你从未到过美国，你也会像玩游戏一样地知道sidewalk，doghouse，ground beef，bedspread，eggplant，baby carriage，garbage truck是什么意思。而英式英语中对应的词就是pavement，kennel，mince，counterpane，aubergine，pram和dust cart，从字面上你无法看出其中的涵义。
Added to this is the peculiar British habit of never saying quite what they mean. Benjamin Disraeli once memorably demonstrated this quintessential British gift when, upon receiving an unsolicited manuscript from an aspiring author, he replied with the note: 'Thank you so much for the manuscript. I shall lose no time
in reading.\" This studied ambiguity -- what we might call a flight from literalness -- remains a characteristic feature of English discourse.
另外一点就是英国人习惯上不指明他们所说的意思，本杰明曾经令人难忘地展示了英国人的这一典型天赋，当收到一位胸怀大志的作者主动寄来的手稿时，他在回信中写到：“谢谢你的手稿，我会抓紧时间来阅读。这种刻意的模棱两可，或者可称为文字上的逃避飞跃，至今仍是英式话语的一大特点。
Be advised that when a British acquaintance says to you, \"You must come for the weekend sometime. And do bring the children -- they are so adorable!\" he will be quite appalled if you actually turn up. British speech is full of phrases -- \"It's no trouble at all,\" \"Of course I don't mind,\" \"No, honestly, I was about to get up anyway\" -- that mean precisely the opposite of what they say.
假如你的一位英国熟人告诉你：“一定来度周末哦，顺便带上孩子们，他们太可爱了！”但如果你真的出现，他们会很惊讶。英式语言充满了“没什么”或“当然不介意”或“不，说实话，我正要起来呢”之类的词组，而实际含义却恰恰相反。
Given such pitfalls, it's little wonder that Americans often make gaffes or fail to catch certain nuances. Just consider the simple word tea, which in Britain can signify a hot drink, an afternoon snack, or even a full evening meal, so that when people say to you, \"come for tea,\" you have no idea when you are expected and what you might hope to be served when you get there. But never mind, because they didn't really mean for you to come in the first place. See how complicated it is?
遭遇如此的陷阱，难怪美国人会时常感到困惑或把握不了细微的差异。就拿简单的“茶”这个词来说吧，在英国，它被描绘成一种热饮，下午小吃或者是晚餐，所以如果有人告诉你“来喝茶吧”，你根本不知道该什么时候去，去了能得到什么样的款待。但是不要紧，他们根本就不想让你去。知道有多复杂了吗？
After I married into this curious island race, I spend years trying to fathom their linguistic ways. I learned that when Britons table a motion they mean shelve it rather than put it forward for discussion, that a courgette is a zucchini and an aubergine an eggplant, that pudding is any kind of dessert, that momentarily means very briefly rather than in a moment (which is why when an American airline pilot announces \"We'll be landing at Heathrow momentarily\" all the British passengers get a worded look and started packing up their carry-on items). I learned that when someone says to me, \"Bill, you're a brick,\" they are not really likening me to an inert building material but complimenting me on some manifestation of solidity and reliability, that \"Bob's your uncle\" is roughly equivalent to presto. I learned all this, and it took years, and I still get confused.
当我嫁进这奇特的岛屿后，多年来我一直在试图了解他们的语言。我了解到英国人table a motion的意思是把这件事搁置一边而不是提出来讨论。courgette是一种绿皮胡瓜，aubergine是茄子，布丁是一种甜点，momentarily意为“短暂的”而不是“一会儿”（这就是为什么美国航空飞行员宣布飞机过会儿要在希思罗机场降落时所有的英国乘客都精神紧张忙着收拾随身物品）。我了解到当有人告诉我“比尔，你是块砖头”时他们并不指我像一块无生命的建筑材料，反而是在夸我表现坚定可靠，“Bob是你叔叔”说起来像一段急板乐曲，我花了很多年来了解这一切，但我还是迷惑不解。
If by chance you are planning a trip to Britain, I hope this has been some help. But if you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to drop by. We'd love to see you. And do bring the children.
也许你正打算到英国旅游，我希望这些能对你有所帮助，如果你还有什么问题的话，尽管到这儿来好了，我们很想认识你，记得一定带上孩子们。
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