高英第三版第二冊原文

1、Unit1Pub Talk and the Kings EnglishHenry Fairlie1 Conversation is the most sociable of all human activities. And it is an activity only of humans. However intricate the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not indulge in anything that deserves the name of conversation. 2 The ch

2、arm of conversation is that it does not really start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where it will go as it meanders or leaps and sparkles or just glows. The enemy of good conversation is the person who has something to say. Conversation is not for making a point. Argument may often be a part

3、 of it, but the purpose of the argument is not to convince. There is no winning in conversation. In fact, the best conversationalists are those who are prepared to lose. Suddenly they see the moment for one of their best anecdotes, but in a flash the conversation has moved on and the opportunity is

4、lost. They are ready to let it go. 3 Perhaps it is because of my up-bringing in English pubs that I think bar conversation has a charm of its own. Bar friends are not deeply involved in each others lives. They are companions, not intimates. The fact that their marriages may be on the rooks, or that

5、their love affairs have been broken or even that they got out of bed on the wrong side is simply not a concern. They are like the musketeers of Dumas who, although they lived side by side with each other, did not delve into,each others lives or the recesses of their thoughts and feelings. 4 It was o

6、n such an occasion the other evening, as the conversation moved desultorily here and there, from the most commonplace to thoughts of Jupiter, without any focus and with no need for one, that suddenly the alchemy of conversation took place, and all at once there was a focus. I do not remember what ma

7、de one of our companions say it-she clearly had not come into the bar to say it, it was not something that was pressing on her mind-but her remark fell quite naturally into the talk. 5 Someone told me the Other day that the phrase, the Kings English was a term of criticism, that it means language wh

8、ich one should not properly use. 6 The glow of the conversation burst into flames. There were affirmations and protests and denials, and of course the promise, made in all such conversation, that we would look it up on the morning. That would settle it; but conversation does not need to be settled;

9、it could still go ignorantly on. 7 It was an Australian who had given her such a definition of the Kings English, which produced some rather tart remarks about what one could expect from the descendants of convicts. We had traveled in five minutes to Australia. Of course, there would be resistance t

10、o the Kings English in such a society. There is always resistance in the lower classes to any attempt by an upper class to lay down rules for English as it should be spoken. 8 Look at the language barrier between the Saxon churls and their Norman conquerors. The conversation had swung from Australia

11、n convicts of the 19th century to the English peasants of the 12th century. Who was right, who was wrong, did not matter. The conversation was on wings. 9 Someone took one of the best-known of examples, which is still always worth the reconsidering. When we talk of meat on our tables we use French w

12、ords; when we speak of the animals from which the meat comes we use Anglo-Saxon words. It is a pig in its sty ; it is pork (porc) on the table. They are cattle in the fields, but we sit down to beef (boeuf). Chickens become poultry (poulet), and a calf becomes veal (veau). Even if our menus were not

13、 wirtten in French out of snobbery, the English we used in them would still be Norman English. What all this tells us is of a deep class rift in the culture of England after the Norman conquest. 10 The Saxon peasants who tilled the land and reared the animals could not afford the meat, which went to

14、 Norman tables. The peasants were allowed to eat the rabbits that scampered over their fields and, since that meat was cheap, the Norman lords of course turned up their noses at it. So rabbit is still rabbit on our tables, and not changed into some rendering of lapin. 11 As we listen today to the ar

15、guments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into the shoes of the Saxon peasant. The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French against his own language. There must have been a great deal of cultural humiliation felt by the English when

16、 they revolted under Saxon leaders like Hereward the Wake. The Kings English-if the term had existed then-had become French. And here in America now, 900 years later, we are still the heirs to it. 12 So the next morning, the conversation over, one looked it up. The phrase came into use some time in

17、the 16th century. Queens English is found in Nashs Strange Newes of the Intercepting Certaine Letters in 1593, and in 1602, Dekker wrote of someone, thou clipst the Kinges English. Is the phrase in Shakespeare? That would be the confirmation that it was in general use. He uses it once, when Mistress

18、 Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor says of her master coming home in a rage, . here will be an old abusing of Gods patience and the Kings English, and it rings true. 13 One could have expected that it would be about then that the phrase would be coined. After five centuries of growth, o1f tussli

19、ng with the French of the Normans and the Angevins and the Plantagenets and at last absorbing it, the conquered in the end conquering the conqueror. English had come royally into its own. 14 There was a Kings (or Queen s) English to be proud of. The Elizabethans blew on it as on a dandelion clock, a

20、nd its seeds multiplied, and floated to the ends of the earth. The Kings English was no longer a form of what would now be regarded as racial discrimination. 15 Yet there had been something in the remark of the Australian. The phrase has always been used a little pejoratively and even facetiously by

21、 the lower classes. One feels that even Mistress Quickly-a servant-is saying that Dr. Caius-her master-will lose his control and speak with the vigor of ordinary folk. If the Kings English is English as it should be spoken, the claim is often mocked by the underlings, when they say with a jeer Engli

22、sh as it should be spoke. The rebellion against a cultural dominance is still there. 16 There is always a great danger, as Carlyle put it, that words will harden into things for us. Words are not themselves a reality, but only representations of it, and the Kings English, like the Anglo-French of th

23、e Normans, is a class representation of reality. Perhaps it is worth trying to speak it, but it should not be laid down as an edict , and made immune to change from below. 17 I have an unending love affair with dictionaries-Auden once said that all a writer needs is a pen, plenty of paper and the be

24、st dictionaries he can afford-but I agree with the person who said that dictionaries are instruments of common sense. The Kings English is a modela rich and instructive one-but it ought not to be an ultimatum. 18 So we may return to my beginning. Even with the most educated and the most literate, th

25、e Kings English slips and slides in conversation. There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he speaks as if he were writing, or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print. When E. M. Forster writes of the sinister corridor of our

26、 age, we sit up at the vividness of the phrase, the force and even terror in the image. But if E. M. Forster sat in our living room and said, We are all following each other down the sinister corridor of our age, we would be justified in asking him to leave. 19 Great authors are constantly being ask

27、ed by foolish people to talk as they write. Other people may celebrate the lofty conversations in which the great minds are supposed to have indulged in the great salons of 18th century Paris, but one suspects that the great minds were gossiping and judging the quality of the food and the wine. Hena

28、ult, then the great president of the First Chamber of the Paris Parlement, complained bitterly of the terrible sauces at the salons of Mme. Deffand, and went on to observe that the only difference between her cook and the supreme chef, Brinvilliers , lay in their intentions. 20 The one place not to

29、have dictionaries is in a sit ting room or at a dining table. Look the thing up the next morning, but not in the middle of the conversation. Other wise one will bind the conversation, one will not let it flow freely here and there. There would have been no conversation the other evening if we had be

30、en able to settle at one the meaning of the Kings English. We would never hay gone to Australia, or leaped back in time to the Norman Conquest. 21 And there would have been nothing to think about the next morning. Perhaps above all, one would not have been engaged by interest in the musketeer who ra

31、ised the subject, wondering more about her. The bother about teaching chimpanzees how to talk is that they will probably try to talk sense and so ruin all conversation.Unit2 Marrkech1 As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few

32、 minutes later.2 The little crowd of mourners - all men and boys, no women-threaded their way across the market place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, walling a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put int

33、o coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like

34、 broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.3 When you walk through a town like this - two hundred

35、 thousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in- when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you arewalking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded u

36、pon this fact. The people have brown faces-besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as your self? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth，they sweat and star

37、ve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy under

38、foot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.4 I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.5 Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without

39、thinking of a mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and

40、 then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.6 An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled slowly towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a

41、sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French: 1 could eat some of that bread.7 I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of themunicipality.8 When you go through

42、 the Jewish Quarters you gather some idea of what the medi ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish Moorishrulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the stree

43、ts are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.9 In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dress

44、ed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits crosslegged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chairlegs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and

45、 thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.10 I was just passing the coppersmiths booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark

46、 holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a mi

47、nute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.11 As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture.

48、 Fruitsellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters - whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitlet wasnt here. Pe

49、rhaps he was on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.12 Yes vieux mon vieux, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They re the real rulers of this country, you know. Theyve got all the money. They

50、control the banks, finance - everything.13 But, I said, isnt it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?14 Ah, thats only for show! They re all money lenders really. They re cunning, the Jews.15 In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women u

51、sed to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal. square meal16 All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. I

52、n northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you dont even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape ones eye takes in everything ex

53、cept the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.17 It is only because of this that the starved countr

54、ies of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange grove or a job in Government service. Or to an

55、Englishman? Camels, castles, palm trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays, and bandits. One could probably live there for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.18 Most of Morocc

56、o is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Lo

57、ng lines of women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wr

58、etched wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on ones shoulder, and fitted underneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey yoked together. T

59、wo donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no narrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it in rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong patches to conserve wat