Every word conceals a story, a secret history. Behind the syllables we use every day lurk countless forgotten tales. “If you know the origin of a word”, the 6th Century scholar Isidore of Seville insisted, “everything can be more clearly comprehended”. While most words slip into currency inconspicuously and without leaving traceable trails of their journeys, there is an elite class of verbal inventions whose exact dates of initial utterance have indeed been carefully recorded.
每個單詞都蘊藏著一段故事，一段不為人知的秘密往事。在一些我們每天都會用到的音節背後，常常有著無數的被人遺忘的故事。六世紀的學者聖依西多祿相信，“當你瞭解了一個單詞背後的故事時，所有事情就都合情合理了。”雖然大多數單詞都是人們在不知不覺中開始廣泛使用的，其起源也無從查起，但是也同樣有很多口語單詞，其人們首次使用它的時間被有心人仔細的記錄了下來。
Some of these words are the one-off brainchildren of individuals who have long faded into the fog of history. Others are the concoctions of cultural pioneers who deliberately set out to shape the way future generations think and speak. In every instance what is remarkable is how the unlocking of a word’s biography helps us unlock both the biography of the individual who coined it as well as the age in which he or she lived. Twitter is one of the word that intrigued people most.
其中有些單詞，是個體人物一次性腦力勞動的產物，那些個體人物已經消失在了歷史的迷霧之中。而其他的一些單詞，則是文化領域的先驅者的調和產物，先驅者們希望能借此來塑造未來世代人們的思維和語言方式。值得一提的是，通過研究某個單詞的歷史，我們還可以瞭解到該單詞創造者的經歷，以及其所在的歷史文化環境。而“Twitter”這個詞，因為其同名社交軟件的火熱，顯得格外令人好奇。
Social media would certainly be a less cheerful place without Twitter’s chirpy logo: that powder-blue profile of a floating bird forever frozen in mid warble. But who first had the phonic imagination to fashion an onomatopoetic compromise between the language of feathers and the language of men? ‘Twitter’ (or ‘twiterith’ as it was initially crafted in the second half of the 14th century), first trilled from the quill of Geoffrey Chaucer in his translation of Consolation of Philosophy by the 6th Century philosopher Boethius. Predating both ‘chirp’ and ‘warble’ by a century, ‘twitter’ is one of over 2,200 words for which the Medieval poet is credited with having inked an inaugural usage.
如果沒有了Twitter的俏皮logo——一隻飛在空中、定格在鳴叫瞬間的小鳥，社交場景裡想必一定會缺了不少生氣。那又是誰，第一個具象化了小鳥鳴叫的瞬間，用擬聲的方法，將動物世界的語言，與人類世界的語言連通起來的呢？英國中世紀著名作家傑佛裡·喬叟在翻譯六世紀哲學家波伊提烏的著作《哲學的慰藉》時，第一次創造了“twitter”這個詞（在14世紀下半葉，一開始人們其實是拼成“twiterith”的）。“twitter”的起源比另外兩個鳥鳴擬聲詞“chirp”和“warble”早了一個世紀。它也是中世紀詩人首創的2200多個單詞之一。
閱讀更多 另一面 的文章
