導(dǎo)語：萬花筒網(wǎng)羅各種題材短文，帶你領(lǐng)略文章精妙用詞！今天的主題是——歷史教授指責(zé)年輕人說話都喜歡加一句“我覺得”是新時代年輕人說話太隨意？還是上一代人沒事找事？

原文：

"The way kids speak today, I'm here to tell you." Over the course of history, every aging generation has made that complaint, and it has always turned out to be 1.（言過其實，夸張的）. That's just as well. If the language really had been 2.（惡化，退化）all this time, we'd all be grunting like bears by now.

But when it comes to language, history is bunk. Or anyway, it hasn't deterred critics from monitoring the speech of today's young people for the signs of cultural decline.

In fact it was a professor of history named Molly Worthen who raised an alarm in The New York Times recently about the way millennials start their sentences with "I feel like," as in, "I feel like the media should concentrate more on the issues."

That expression may sound merely diffident, Worthen says, but its real purpose is to avoid confrontation by turning every statement into a feeling that halts an argument in its tracks — how can you say that my experience isn't valid? In the end, she says, "I feel like" makes logical discussion impossible and 3.（暗中破壞）the conduct of public life.

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You have to be doggedly 1.（遲鈍的）to hear those uses of "feel" as mere effusions of feeling, much less to take them as evidence that millennials have all bailed on the sturdy rationalism of the Gen-Xers and Boomers and given themselves over to rampant subjectivity. Young people are perfectly capable of 2.（清晰地表達(dá)）logical opinions, whether about baseball or the political process —they just introduce them differently.

But then these lamentations are always obtuse. The complaints about "I feel like" are no more off-the-wall than the complaints people make about texting abbreviations, vocal fry and the other features that make the language of the young sound weird to older ears. Critics always want to make the next generation seem more alien than it actually is, like anthropologists reporting back from a field trip to Youngster Island.

Linguistically speaking, the hippies were right about people over 30. That's when our ear for language begins to fail us. It gets harder to learn new languages or memorize poetry; we forget more old words than we learn new ones. And we're apt to misunderstand what young people are trying to say. We register the words and tones but we can't imagine our way into their meanings. All we can do is project, 3.（潤色）their words with our associations.

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譯文參考：

?“我得說說現(xiàn)在年輕人的說話方式?！痹跉v史的進程中，上一代人都會有這樣的抱怨，不過每次都言過其實。這也沒什么不好。如果語言一直都是一代不如一代，我們現(xiàn)在就該像動物一樣只能嗷嗷叫了。

一說到語言，歷史就是個騙小孩的玩意。但也阻止不了評論家監(jiān)督年輕人的說話方式，找出文化衰退的跡象。

實際上，正是一位叫莫利·沃森的歷史教授最近在《紐約時報》撰文敲響了警鐘，她表示最近的年輕人說話總在開頭加一句“我覺得”，比如“我覺得媒體應(yīng)該更加關(guān)注這些問題?！?/p>

這個短語可能只是有點奇怪，沃森說，但真正的目的是把每個觀點轉(zhuǎn)化成停止?fàn)幷摰母杏X，從而避免沖突——你總不能說我的感覺不成立吧？最終，她說“我覺得”不能構(gòu)成理性的討論，而且逐漸破壞了公共生活。

你得強壓著自己不能太靈敏，一聽到“覺得”就認(rèn)為是抒發(fā)感情，更不用說以這個為依據(jù)，證明新時代年輕人徹底放棄了“X一代”或“嬰兒潮”時代人們的理性主義，轉(zhuǎn)而一股腦地投身到主觀思想。不管是討論棒球還是政治議程，年輕人完全可以清楚地表達(dá)自己的邏輯觀點，他們只是換了一種表達(dá)方式而已。

但這些唱衰的觀點語義不明。對“我覺得”的怨念與以往不同，以前年輕人的各種縮略語、氣泡音還有其他表達(dá)方式稀奇古怪，讓長輩的耳朵反應(yīng)不過來。評論家總要夸大新時代年輕人的代溝，像是人類學(xué)家回來報告“少年孤島”之行。

從語言學(xué)角度來看，嬉皮士對30多歲的人的看法是對的，我們的耳朵對語言的敏感性讓我們失望了。年齡一到，更難學(xué)習(xí)新語言或背誦詩歌，學(xué)新東西的速度趕不上忘記舊東西的速度。而且我們更傾向于誤解年輕人要表達(dá)的意思。我們抓住了字詞和音調(diào)，卻猜不出它們的意思。我們所做的就是投射，把自己的聯(lián)想潤色到他們的字詞上。

喜歡我們的欄目歡迎訂閱：

也歡迎來視聽森林，和大家一起提升聽力和翻譯能力哦~