冠状病毒改变我们的语言 The pandemic has transformed lives and livelihoods.冠状病毒大流行改变了人们的生活和生计方式。But it’s changed the little details, too—like the language we use—peppering our everyday speech with scientific terms like “social distancing,” “superspreader” and “asymptomatic.”但它也改变了很多小细节，比如我们使用的语言。我们的日常用语中充斥着“社交距离”、“超级传播者”和“无症状”等科学术语。“We’ve all had to become amateur epidemiologists and familiarize ourselves with these terms that normally we’d expect to be in some journal article somewhere.”“我们都必须成为业余的流行病学家，要熟悉这些术语，因为这些术语通常会出现在某些期刊文章中。”Ben Zimmer is a linguist and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He says a lot of the words that came up fresh to many people in 2020 had existed in scholarly literature for decades.本·齐默是《华尔街日报》的语言学家和语言专栏作家。他说，在2020年对很多人来说新鲜的单词已经在学术文献中存在了几十年。“So, for example, ‘contact tracing’ is attested from 1910—been in use for well over a century. There’s an example from an Australian medical journal talking about school epidemics back in 1910. and they’re talking about contact tracing as something a school nurse would need to do to figure out who was infected.”“所以，例如，‘接触者追踪’从1910年就了——已经使用了一个多世纪。有一个来自澳大利亚医学杂志的例子，在1910年谈到了学校的流行病，他们说学校护士需要追踪接触者，以确定谁被感染了。”And the term quarantine—which derives from a Renaissance-era Italian word meaning a 40-day waiting period for ships arriving from plague-stricken ports—dates back centuries. But it took on new life during the pandemic.“检疫隔离”一词源于文艺复兴时期的一个意大利词，意为从受瘟疫侵袭的港口驶来的船只需要等待40天，这个词可以追溯到几个世纪前。但在大流行期间，这个词语 重生了。“Everyone’s talking about quarantining, and it starts generating all these new forms as well—‘Drink your quarantini,’ ‘You can grow a quaranbeard,’ and on and on and on as people got creative by taking these words and forming new innovative expressions out of them.”“每个人都在谈论隔离，它也开始产生一些新形式——‘喝你的隔离鸡尾酒’，‘你可以长一个免疫胡子，’等等，人们创造性地利用这些词，形成新的创新表达。”Zimmer also chairs the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society. At a recent virtual meeting, they voted on the 2020 Word of the Year.齐默还是美国方言协会新词委员会主席。在最近的一次虚拟会议上，他们投票决定了2020年的年度词汇。Selecting from candidates like “doomscrolling” or “social distancing” and “unprecedented,” the group ultimately chose a different word, which, unlike the others, was newly coined in 2020 and truly defined what turned out to be a terrible year: “COVID.”从“末日卷轴”、“社交距离” “前所未有”(史无前例)等候选词汇中，该小组最终选择了一个不同的词，这个词与其他词不同，是2020年新创造的，它真正定义了后来被证明是可怕的一年:“COVID - 19”。