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.
每个单词都蕴藏着一段故事，一段不为人知的秘密往事。在一些我们每天都会用到的音节背后，常常有着无数的被人遗忘的故事。六世纪的学者圣依西多禄相信，“当你了解了一个单词背后的故事时，所有事情就都合情合理了。”虽然大多数单词都是人们在不知不觉中开始广泛使用的，其起源也无从查起，但是也同样有很多口语单词，其人们首次使用它的时间被有心人仔细的记录了下来。
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.
其中有些单词，是个体人物一次性脑力劳动的产物，那些个体人物已经消失在了历史的迷雾之中。而其他的一些单词，则是文化领域的先驱者的调和产物，先驱者们希望能借此来塑造未来世代人们的思维和语言方式。值得一提的是，通过研究某个单词的历史，我们还可以了解到该单词创造者的经历，以及其所在的历史文化环境。而“Twitter”这个词，因为其同名社交软件的火热，显得格外令人好奇。
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.
如果没有了Twitter的俏皮logo——一只飞在空中、定格在鸣叫瞬间的小鸟，社交场景里想必一定会缺了不少生气。那又是谁，第一个具象化了小鸟鸣叫的瞬间，用拟声的方法，将动物世界的语言，与人类世界的语言连通起来的呢？英国中世纪著名作家杰佛里·乔叟在翻译六世纪哲学家波伊提乌的著作《哲学的慰藉》时，第一次创造了“twitter”这个词（在14世纪下半叶，一开始人们其实是拼成“twiterith”的）。“twitter”的起源比另外两个鸟鸣拟声词“chirp”和“warble”早了一个世纪。它也是中世纪诗人首创的2200多个单词之一。
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