词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Trademarking 'Freedom of Expression

Broadcast on "Coast to Coast": February 13, 2003

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- labeling love. On this eve of Valentine's Day, the romance holiday, we introduce you to a couple of architects from New York City. They built a relationship but didn't know what to name it.

RS: Madeline Schwartzman and Jeffrey Miles met at the Graduate School of Architecture at Yale University in 1986.

MUSIC: "Mad About You"/Belinda Carlisle

RS: This song was popular that year. At first the terms "boyfriend and girlfriend" worked fine for Maddy and Jeff. But after a few years, practical matters intruded¹. Jeff wasn't sure how to list Maddy as his beneficiary on benefit forms at work.

MILES: "When they came to relationship, what do you put? So I used to put 'lover.' When I'd get back the completed official forms, they obviously couldn't recognize that in their officialese, so they would always change it to 'partner.'"

RS: "You like that word?"

SCHWARTZMAN: "I think it's too generic²."

AA: "You know the thing with partner, too, is that it really has changed in common usage, where now because gays and lesbians use that to refer to their partners -- "

RS: "And it also has a business connotation."

AA: "Right, and now you hear people more when they talk about a partner in the business sense, they will specify³ 'this is my business partner,' just to avoid any, you know, confusion."

SCHWARTZMAN: "It's interesting that you bring that up. If I may back up to 'lover,' one other thing that happened with lover is -- if I may Jeff tell this story -- is, he had a business meeting and it turned out they discussed that I had gone to high school at Horace Mann, and so Jeff said 'my lover went to Horace Mann' and the man he was talking to said 'oh, my lover went to Horace Mann too, what's his name?' But 'partner,' Jeff and I did an architecture job together ... "

MILES: "Yes, and we were partners on that project, but of course we were partners in love also. So that worked at all different levels at that point in time."

RS: "So you've been together for about seventeen years -- "

SCHWARTZMAN: "Yes."

RS: "Correct? And over those seventeen years, you've had to introduce each other. Did that seem to be a problem?"

MILES: "You know, it was a self-imposed hardship. Maddy and I could have gotten married anytime, but we resisted for whatever reasons, and after awhile, yes, it was kind of awkward and actually kind of annoying, too, to have to explain who we were to each other in sentences rather than one word, because it just shows how limited some of these terms are for people with this ambiguous legal situation that we had."

SCHWARTZMAN: "You have to start to qualify 'boyfriend' -- boyfriend of how long? So then it was like 'boyfriend of eight years,' 'boyfriend of ten years.' But then right about 'boyfriend of fifteen years,' people started getting annoyed and saying 'you can't call him your boyfriend after fifteen years."

AA: "So is it really that it wasn't your problem so much as everyone else's. Is this sort of a societal -- I mean, do we need another term?"

MILES: "Maybe this is the point of the whole terminology⁴, to herd⁵ people towards eventually doing what we decided⁶ to do, get married, because now it's so simple. We're 'husband and wife,' legally, up and down, left and right. Maybe this whole thing is some sort of -- the lack of terminology is a way to kind of move people through the romance pipeline⁷."

RS: "Let's just sum up here and run through some of the names that you called yourselves -- willingly or unwillingly⁸ -- through the last seventeen years."

SCHWARTZMAN: "'Boyfriend and girlfriend,' 'long-term boyfriend.'"

MILES: "'Significant other' -- that was in the late eighties."

SCHWARTZMAN: "'The guy I live with.'"

MILES: "The woman I live with."

SCHWARTZMAN: "The guy I lived with for sixteen years."

MILES: "Partner."

SCHWARTZMAN: "Then I started to say 'my guy.'"

MILES: "'Lover.'"

SCHWARTZMAN: "Then it was just 'Jeff.'"

MILES: "Oh, and we never really took on too much, but the 'fiance' thing, we sometimes used that. That was recently."

SCHWARTZMAN: "We had a reputation now for so long, so many people knew us that we could just say 'Jeff.' We didn't have to explain it anymore. Almost everybody knew and they stopped bothering us. I think that's why we got married."

MILES: "In fact, a lot of people I've talked to said 'oh, we thought you were married.' So, after a while everything kind of comes together, fuses into one."

SCHWARTZMAN: "Even my father thought, when I said 'now you have a son-in-law,' he said 'I always thought of Jeff as my son-in-law.'"

AA: "Aw."

SCHWARTZMAN: "Yeah, it was sweet."

AA: And when the time came to make it official, Madeline Schwartzman and Jeffrey Miles didn't tell anyone. They simply went down to a clerk at city hall in Manhattan two weeks ago and became ... newlyweds.

RS: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our programs are on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is [email protected]. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

MUSIC: "Mad About You"

1 intruded   

n.侵入的，推进的v.侵入，侵扰，打扰( intrude的过去式和过去分词 )；把…强加于

参考例句：

• One could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before. 你简直会以为那是从来没有人到过的地方。 来自辞典例句
• The speaker intruded a thin smile into his seriousness. 演说人严肃的脸上掠过一丝笑影。 来自辞典例句

2 generic   

adj.一般的，普通的，共有的

参考例句：

• I usually buy generic clothes instead of name brands.我通常买普通的衣服，不买名牌。
• The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual.一般妇女在婚后似乎有特别突出的抑制个性的能力。

3 specify   

vt.指定，详细说明

参考例句：

• We should specify a time and a place for the meeting.我们应指定会议的时间和地点。
• Please specify what you will do.请你详述一下你将做什么。

4 terminology   

n.术语；专有名词

参考例句：

• He particularly criticized the terminology in the document.他特别批评了文件中使用的术语。
• The article uses rather specialized musical terminology.这篇文章用了相当专业的音乐术语。

5 herd   

n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起

参考例句：

• She drove the herd of cattle through the wilderness.她赶着牛群穿过荒野。
• He had no opinions of his own but simply follow the herd.他从无主见，只是人云亦云。

6 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

7 pipeline   

n.管道，管线

参考例句：

• The pipeline supplies Jordan with 15 per cent of its crude oil.该管道供给约旦15%的原油。
• A single pipeline serves all the houses with water.一条单管路给所有的房子供水。

8 unwillingly   

adv.不情愿地

参考例句：

• He submitted unwillingly to his mother. 他不情愿地屈服于他母亲。
• Even when I call, he receives unwillingly. 即使我登门拜访，他也是很不情愿地接待我。