词汇大师-- What Are Your Agenda for the Meeting?

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with Pat O'Conner, co-author with her husband Stewart Kellerman of a new book called "Origins of the Specious¹: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language."
RS: But first, here's a question for you. Which would you say, "All debts are cleared between you and I" or "All debts are cleared between you and me"? Is "I" or "me" the correct object? According to Pat O'Conner, for centuries either one would have been fine. Shakespeare, you should know, used "I" when he included that line in "The Merchant of Venice."
AA: But later the rule books got rewritten. Pat O'Conner says some people in the nineteenth century, probably influenced by rules for Latin, began to argue that "I" was wrong -- well, you know what I mean. Which leads to a question that Pat O'Conner gets asked a lot: who decides what's right? She says we all do.

　　PAT O'CONNER: "Well, if something becomes a common enough usage, it becomes the accepted usage. Take the word 'agenda,' for instance. As recently as the nineteenth century it was a plural² word. It meant the items on a list. Someone might have said to you 'What are your agenda for our meeting?' Later the word 'agenda' became used as a singular for the list itself rather than the items on the list.
"And similarly the words 'media' and 'data' are now changing. They're on the cusp of changing. 'Data,' I think, is over the edge. It's very seldom used as a plural anymore. Even the New York Times has changed its policy on that. It now has come to mean information as a whole."
RS: "How does a person learning English as a foreign language -- or someone who knows English quite well as a native speaker -- know what's right? It's not always what sounds right, or is it?"
PAT O'CONNER: "It depends on how well read you are, what you hear when you're growing up and those sorts of things. But I think for someone learning English as a second language, the best thing you can do is to acquire a good, up-to-date dictionary of American English -- say the American Heritage, fourth edition, or the Merriam-Webster 's Collegiate, eleventh edition, something like that that's always being updated. And always read the fine print. These things do change.
"For example, fifty years ago, if you looked in a dictionary for how to pronounce the word spelled n-i-c-h-e, you would have seen only one proper English pronunciation and that is 'nitch.' A lot of people don't realize this. They think that 'neesh' is the only correct pronunciation.
"In fact, 'neesh' evolved as an error. It was a Frenchification of the word. People looked at it, it looked French, they started pronouncing it as if it were French. It made it into dictionaries because it was so common, and now dictionaries give two pronunciations."
AA: "And you write that 'neesh' is now forcing out 'nitch.'"
PAT O'CONNER: "It is -- it's inching ahead!"
RS: "Something that we consider here at WORDMASTER very colloquial³ is 'ain't.' And according to your book, it hasn't always been considered bad English."
PAT O'CONNER: "No, it was formed around the early sixteen hundreds with a huge class of other contractions⁵: don't, can't, isn't. And ain't was one of them. It was a contraction⁴ for two sets of words, for 'am not' and 'are not.' And it was originally spelled a'nt or a'n't. Perfectly⁶ legitimate⁷.
"The problem was, in the late seventeen hundreds, people started using it as a contraction for 'is not.' And then in the eighteen hundreds they started using it as a contraction for 'have not' and 'has not,' as in 'I ain't got my wallet with me' or 'He ain't here.' Well, as soon as it got too big for its britches, ain't lost its reputation for legitimacy⁸. Its parentage just could not be traced. And so it's been considered a grammatical no-no since sometime in the nineteenth century."
RS: Pat O'Conner's newest book is "Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language." We'll talk more with her next time.
AA: And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 specious   

adj.似是而非的；adv.似是而非地

参考例句：

• Such talk is actually specious and groundless.这些话实际上毫无根据，似是而非的。
• It is unlikely that the Duke was convinced by such specious arguments.公爵不太可能相信这种似是而非的论点。

2 plural   

n.复数；复数形式；adj.复数的

参考例句：

• Most plural nouns in English end in's '.英语的复数名词多以s结尾。
• Here you should use plural pronoun.这里你应该用复数代词。

3 colloquial   

adj.口语的，会话的

参考例句：

• It's hard to understand the colloquial idioms of a foreign language.外语里的口头习语很难懂。
• They have little acquaintance with colloquial English. 他们对英语会话几乎一窍不通。

4 contraction   

n.缩略词，缩写式，害病

参考例句：

• The contraction of this muscle raises the lower arm.肌肉的收缩使前臂抬起。
• The forces of expansion are balanced by forces of contraction.扩张力和收缩力相互平衡。

5 contractions   

n.收缩( contraction的名词复数 )；缩减；缩略词；（分娩时）子宫收缩

参考例句：

• Contractions are much more common in speech than in writing. 缩略词在口语里比在书写中常见得多。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Muscle contractions are powered by the chemical adenosine triphosphate(ATP ). 肌肉收缩是由化学物质三磷酸腺苷(ATP)提供动力的。 来自辞典例句

6 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

7 legitimate   

adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法

参考例句：

• Sickness is a legitimate reason for asking for leave.生病是请假的一个正当的理由。
• That's a perfectly legitimate fear.怀有这种恐惧完全在情理之中。

8 legitimacy   

n.合法，正当

参考例句：

• The newspaper was directly challenging the government's legitimacy.报纸直接质疑政府的合法性。
• Managing from the top down,we operate with full legitimacy.我们进行由上而下的管理有充分的合法性。