這些新興詞彙其實血統古老，你知道嗎？

事實上，今天的一些年輕人使用的詞彙並不是新出現的詞彙。這裏有五個單詞你可能認爲是21世紀的產物，這實際上這些詞很早就出現了。

LOL 大聲笑

I spent some years wondering why my Dad ended his text messages to me suggesting he was ‘laughing out loud’, often when no joke appeared to have been made, until I realised that he was under the impression that LOL meant ‘lots of love’. It’s 1-0 to me here, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates LOL for ‘laughing out loud’as far back as 1989, and doesn’t currently include it as an abbreviation for ‘lots of love’–but both of us are beaten, chronologically, by a definition that dates back to 1960, where LOL is used as an initialism (but not an acronym) for ‘little old lady’.

我花了幾年在想爲什麼我爸爸總以哈哈大笑結束他的短信，而短息也並沒有玩笑話，直到我意識到，他的印象中LOL表示lots of love大量的愛。根據《牛津英語詞典》，從1989年起，LOL表示“哈哈大笑”，並沒有把它作爲lots of love的縮寫，但出乎我們意料的，追溯到1960年，LOL用作little old lady（小老太）的縮寫。

Text, v.文本；發短信

Often developments in the English language are looked at askance by those who would class themselves as purists, and I’ve heard more than one person cry out in anguish at the idea of text as a verb. It’s become a part of everyday language for many people, describing the action of sending a text message on a mobile phone. But before your hackles rise, it’s worth knowing that text, as a verb, is the oldest of the five words in this article –dating to 1564. True, that sense made no mention of the mobile phone (unsurprisingly), meaning instead ‘to cite texts’, but another 16th-century sense describes a situation familiar to anybody who has tried to convey shouting in a text message, or accidentally hit caps lock on their keyboard: ‘to inscribe, write, or print in capital or large letters’.

純粹主義者總是用挑剔的眼光來看待英語語言的發展，我聽到不止一個人在認爲text不能作爲一個動詞。然而，它作爲動詞使用已經成爲許多人的日常用語，描述手機發送一個文本消息的過程。令你驚訝的是，text作爲一個動詞使用可以追溯到1564年的文章中，是最古老的五個詞之一。這個意義與手機無關，相反，其意思爲引用文本，但另一個16世紀的用法爲強調信息或者用大寫字母書寫。

Unfriend 解除好友關係

As was recently explored on OxfordWords, the influence of Facebook on language is quite widespread. The verb unfriend, though it has gained widespread currency as the ultimate act of social severance in social media, dates back to 1659, according to current OED findings. It existed even earlier as a noun –as far back as 1275.

正如牛津詞彙最近發現，Facebook對語言的影響相當廣泛。動詞unfriend，作爲解除好友關係的使用方法已經較爲普遍，根據《牛津英語詞典》記載，這種用法可以但追溯到1659年。Unfriend早在1275年的時候，就作爲名詞使用。

Fanboy/Fangirl 狂熱愛好者

If your love of Sherlock, Doctor Who, or, indeed, any cultural phenomenon crosses the borderline between admiration and fanaticism, then chances are you’ve been labelled a fanboy or fangirl. They are simple compounds from the words fan and boy or OED currently dates fanboy’s first appearance in print to 1919 (the original Sherlock Holmes stories were published between 1887 and 1927). Fangirl wasn’t too far behind, in 1934. At the moment the OED doesn’t include verbal uses of these words, but the Oxford Corpus suggests these are growing in popularity.

如果你非常喜歡神探夏洛克、神祕博士或者其他文化作品，你可能被視爲“fanboy/fangirl”（狂熱愛好者），這兩個詞是由單詞fan 、boy 和girl形成的複合詞。因爲目前《牛津英語詞典》中fanboy第一次出現要追溯到1919年(最早的福爾摩斯故事發表在1887年到1927年之間)。Fangirl出現在不久之後的1934年。當時《牛津英語詞典》並沒有收錄這些詞的口頭表達，但牛津語料庫表明這些詞彙將會越來越受歡迎。

Hip-hop 街舞，即興音樂；嘻哈

The modern sense of hip-hop, a noun and adjective denoting a style of popular music of US black and Hispanic origin, is currently dated to 1981 in the OED, but it was preceded by over 300 years by an adverbial use meaning ‘with hopping movement’. At the moment, the second Duke of Buckingham is recorded as having written the earliest instance of hip-hop, in a play called The Rehearsal, which, to my mind, makes him something of a hip-hop icon.

hip-hop現代的含義可以作爲名詞和形容詞，表示一種起源於美國黑人和西班牙裔的流行音樂，這種用法在《牛津英語詞典》中可追溯至1981年。但之前300多年，hip-hop作爲狀語使用，表示“帶有跳躍的運動”。目前，第二任白金漢公爵最早使用hip-hop，將其寫入戲劇《彩排》中。在我看來，這使得他某種程度上成爲嘻哈達人。

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