美国政客教你如何用英语优雅的骂人

In the run-up to today’s mid-term election, observers of American politics have lamented that the nation’s political landscape is more divided than ever. A Pew Research Center report released this year concluded that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines—and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive—than at any point in the last two decades.” As anyone who has ever looked through comments on a political blog can attest, this polarization often translates into venomous language, with Republicans and Democrats slinging insults at each other over the partisan divide.

在今天的中期选举拉开序幕前，美国政治观察家纷纷哀叹于国家政治格局的空前分裂。皮尤研究中心今年发布的一项调查认为“共和党和民主党在意识形态方面的分歧越发明显，党派间的相互反感愈演愈烈，为二十年来之最。”无论是谁，只要看了政治博客上的评论，都会知道这种两极分化必会引发一场骂战，会使共和党和民主党在党派分歧上互相诋毁。

American English has a specialized vocabulary of insults based on party affiliation. For instance, a Democrat deriding a Republican might use the term wingnut, combining the notion of right-wing extremism and irrational nuttiness, or Rethuglican (Rethug for short), a blend of Republican and thug. The lexicon of Republican insults for Democrats includes moonbat, which the late William Safire traced back to libertarian blogger Perry de Havilland in the fuller form “barking moonbat”, suggesting ideology-crazed partisans howling at the moon. Even more common than moonbat in Oxford’s tracking corpus is the schoolyard-esque slur libtard (from liberal and –tard in retard, an offensive term for a person with intellectual disabilities). Liberal neologists have gotten in on the -tard act too, but Teatard (with reference to the conservative Tea Party movement), conservatard, and Republitard have thus far failed to achieve widespread currency.

美式英语中基于党派关系有一个名为“诋毁“的专业术语。例如，一个民主党可能用“Wingnut疯子”一词嘲弄共和党人，这个词汇兼具右翼极端主义与缺乏理性的概念。或使用“Rethuglican”（简称为Rethug），融合了暴徒和民主党之意。共和党诋毁民主党人的词汇包括“moonbat”，可以从已故的威廉•萨菲尔追溯到完整写出 “barking moonbat”的自由博主佩里德哈维兰，词意为一群心存幻想的疯子。在不断更新的牛津英语语料库中，校园式毁谤词汇“libtard” （由词汇“自由”liberal和“傻子”retard中的’tard’组成，是一种对于智障人士的蔑称）的使用甚至比 “moonbat” 更为常见。自由的新语创造者也创造了带有“tard”的词汇，但 “teatard” （参照保守主义的茶党运动）， “conservatard”,和 “republitard”却至今仍未能实现广泛使用。

Of course, Americans don’t always/ insult their political opponents using party-specific terminology. More often, they choose from English’s vast wealth of nonpartisan putdowns. Wondering whether there were patterns in how often common negative words were applied to people of various political stripes, I analyzed the American sources collected since 2017 by Oxford’s New Monitor Corpus (which aggregates more than 100 million words of English usage each month from online publications) to find the negative nouns most frequently modified by liberal, left-wing, and Democrat(ic), on the one hand, and conservative, right-wing, and Republican on the other. This is a crude approximation, since the pattern “[partisan adjective] [noun]” represents a small proportion of all partisan insults. Nonetheless, the results were intriguing. Out of a sample of about 1200 negative phrases gathered, these were the top 10 negative terms applied to liberals and conservatives by overall frequency:

当然,美国人并不总是用特定的政党术语诋毁其政治对手。更多时候，他们会从庞大丰富的非党派英语词汇中选择贬损的语言。那些用于攻击各派系的常用负面词多久出现一次？它们出现是否有固定的模式？为了了解这些，我对于2017年以来牛津新监测到的语料库（它汇集每月网上出版物多达100多万字的英语用法）中所收集的美式英语词汇进行分析，发现负面名词一方面常被用于修饰“liberal自由主义”，“left-wing左翼”及“Democratic民主党”，另一方面，它也被用作“保守主义conservative”，“右翼right-wing”及“共和Democratic”的修饰词。这只是个大概的猜测，因为这个模式“【partisan党派 形容词】【名词】“仅代表小部分的党派诋毁词汇。然而结果相当有趣。在收集的1200个负面词汇样本中，从总体使用频率上看，以下是用于自由主义和保守主义的10大负面词汇。

The overall number of insults in the sample was split fairly evenly between liberals and conservatives, but the insults lobbed at liberals were more varied; the top insult for conservatives, extremist, was used three times as often than the top insult for a liberal, hack. In a time of much-lamented partisanship, it is perhaps unsurprising that words associated with ideological extremism (extremist, ideologue, radical, zealot) were among the most common terms of criticism. Similarly, the lack of civility in our political discourse shines through in the frequency of taunts suggesting stupidity and irrationality. Such terms were brandished on both sides, but liberals were more likely to be called morons, fools, and loons, whereas conservatives were most often derided as nutjobs, nuts, and lunatics. Idiot was a favorite on both sides of the aisle.

我们可以看出样本中，自由主义与保守主义的诋毁词汇数量几乎相当，但用于攻击自由主义的诋毁词汇更为多样；在对保守主义的诋毁词汇中，出现频率最高的是“extremist极端分子”，比用于自由主义的诋毁词汇“hack骇客”的使用频率高出三倍。在这个哀叹党派纷争的时期，即使那些关于极端主义意识形态的词汇（如“extremist极端分子”,“ideologue空想家”，“radical激进分子”，“zealot狂热分子”）成为最常用的批判术语也不足为奇。同样，因缺乏文明而大肆嘲讽的政治话语显得有些愚蠢与非理性。双方使用这些词语相互攻击，自由主义容易被保守主义叫做“morons白痴”，“fools傻子”，以及”loons废物”，保守主义则常被自由主义嘲讽为“nutjobs蠢货”，“nuts疯子”和“lunatics精神病”。而“Idiot笨蛋”是双方都喜欢用的诋毁词汇。

The type of adjective favored in insulting phrases varied by partisan affiliation as well. People insulting conservatives favored the adjective right-wing, which was more than twice as common as Republican and nearly four times more common than conservative. In contrast, the dominant adjective in negative epithets for liberals was— liberal. Liberal was used more than four times as often as left-wing, and Democrat and Democratic accounted for only a fraction of the insults for liberals, with the former used twice as often as the latter. Grammatically speaking, the preference for Democrat over Democraticas a modifier is perplexing, since Democratic is an adjective whereas Democrat is a noun (used attributively). However, it is in keeping with a longstanding tradition among Republicans of dropping the –ic in order to maintain a distinction from the broader, positive associations of the adjective democratic with democracy and egalitarianism.诋毁类词汇中的形容词也会根据政党关系的变化而变化。诋毁保守主义的人会倾向使用形容词“right-wing右翼的”，其使用频率是 “共和的Republican”的两倍多，几近“保守的conservative”的四倍。而在对于自由主义的诋毁中，占主导地位的负面形容词为“liberal自由主义的”，其使用率比“left-wing左翼的”高出四倍。“Democrat民主人士”和“Democratic民主的”仅占诋毁自由主义词汇的一小部分，前者的使用频率是后者的两倍。从语法上看，较词汇“Democratic民主的”而选择“Democrat民主人士”有些令人费解，因为 “Democratic”是形容词而 “Democrat”是名词（被修饰）。然而，它合乎共和党长期以来摒弃“ic”的传统，以便与形容词“democratic民主的”更宽泛积极的寓意，既“民主与平等”，区分开来。

The figure below shows the percentage of usage of the top insults in the sample applied to liberals and conservatives, respectively:

以下数据显示了分别在自由主义和保守主义中最常用的诋毁词汇的使用比例。

The range of negative terms applied mainly to liberals was broader, with insults aimed at conservatives being relatively concentrated. Hack, shill, and hypocrite suggest an impugning of liberals’ motivations, while hippie and elitist echo well-known stereotypes about those with liberal political leanings. The prominence of lemming, loser, and loon among insults for left-wing liberals points to a conservative affinity for alliteration, but the other L-word on the list, lunatic, is more often applied to conservatives. The list of negative words most often applied to conservatives was dominated by terms emphasizing ideological extremism: fanatic, extremist, ideologue, and zealot. The presence of obstructionist on the list reflects Democratic criticism of tactics used by Republican politicians in Congress, whereas the prominence of misogynist is likely related to Democratic efforts to portray Republicans as being engaged in a so-called “War on Women”. A case can be made that our language of partisan insults is as polarized as every other aspect of American political life. But there may be a ray of hope: partisans on both sides of the aisle accuse each other of being racists and bigots, demonstrating a consensus that intolerance and discrimination are universally reprehensible. And while there may not be much common ground between Democrats and Republicans, at least we can all agree on calling each other “idiots”.

由上图可看出，用于自由主义的负面词汇范围更广一些，而针对保守主义的诋毁词汇相对集中。“Hack骇客”，“shill骗子”，和“hypocrite伪君子”往往作为对自由主义的抨击动机，而“hippie嬉皮士”和“精英”等俗套称呼则因是形容那些具有自由主义政治倾向的人而被熟知。对于偏向保守的左翼自由主义，主要的诋毁词汇有“lemming旅鼠”，“loser输家”，和“loon蠢人”，而同样以 “L”字打头的另一个单词“lunatic疯子”则多用于保守主义。主要用于保守主义的负面词汇常常强调意识形态的极端主义，如“fanatic狂徒”, extremist“极端分子”, ideologue“空想家”, and zealot“狂热分子”。“obstructionist蓄意阻挠者”一词的出现反映了共和党政客在国会中施尽招数批判民主党，而“misogynist女性歧视者”则显示出民主党对于塑造共和党从事所谓的“妇女战争”方面做出的努力。党派诋毁的语言就如同美国政治生活的其他方面一样两极化，但是可能还有一线希望：两党双方互相指责对方为种族歧视者和偏执狂，这表明双方达成一种共识，即不容忍和歧视应该受到谴责。也许民主党和共和党之间没有太多共同立场，但至少可以一致同意称对方为“idiots傻瓜”。