学了十几年的英语，可是一上国外的社交网站，还是经常感觉两眼一抹黑。熟悉的英文单词中夹杂着一些莫名其妙的火星文，简直无法get歪果仁想说什么。当零零后成为网络上的主力军，连社交媒体都变成了火星文的天下。不过他们的火星文并不是真的来自火星，反而大有学问~

Young people in some English-speaking countries like the US, the UK and Australia are speaking a strange language these days, especially when they are communicating on social media.

最近在一些英语国家，如美国、英国、澳大利亚，年轻人都在说一种奇怪的火星文，特别是在社交媒体上。

Take these tweets curated by The Washington Post for example: “David Bowie dying is totes tradge,” and “When Cookie hugged Jamal it made me totes emosh.”

以《华盛顿邮报》选出的这几条推文为例：“大卫•鲍伊的死奏素个杯具”，“看到库奇和贾马尔抱在一起，鸡冻死我袅。”



Or take this sentence, cited by the Australian news website News.com.au: “BAE, LMK if you stay in tonight because I’ll have serious FOMO.”

澳大利亚新闻网站News.com.au曾引用过这句话：“北鼻，如果今夜在家必告我，因我特别怕错见。”

What on earth do they mean? Well, “totes” is a short form of the adverb “totally”. Likewise, “tradge” means “tragic” and “emosh” means “emotional”. It seems that, for millennials, typing in this abbreviated form is not only time-saving but hip. As to the last sentence, it means: “Babe, let me know if you stay in tonight because I’ll have serious fear of missing out.”

它们到底是什么意思？好吧，“totes”是副词“totally”的缩写，而“tradge”就是“tragic”，“emosh”是“emotional”。对零零后来说，使用这些缩写似乎不仅是节约时间，更是一种潮流。上面引用的第三句话，意思是“宝贝，如果你今晚在家务必要告诉我（LMK :let me know），因为我特别害怕错过和你见面的机会 （FOMO: fear of missing out）。”



As you can see, many millennial slang words are formed by what linguists call the practice of “totesing” – the systematic abbreviation of words, according to an article in The Washington Post. The trend might have started with “totally” becoming “totes”, but it now has spread to many other English words.

正如你所见，许多零零后说的俚语都是由语言学家称之为“网络缩略词”的词汇组成，据《华盛顿邮报》的一篇文章称，这是一种词汇的系统性缩写。这一轮潮流由单词“totally”被缩写为“totes”开始，现在已经普及到了其他英语单词。

The origins of other millennial slang expressions are more complicated than “totesing”. “Bae”, for example, has been widely used by African-Americans for years, according to an article in The Guardian. It can be an expression of intimacy with one’s romantic partner or, like “sweetheart”, a term of affection for someone with whom there is no romantic connection. After pop singer Pharrell and Miley Cyrus used the word in their work, “bae” became mainstream.

零零后使用的其他俚语表达的起源要比“网络缩略词”复杂得多。以“bae”为例，据英国《卫报》的文章说，它很多年之前就被非裔美国人广为使用。它能表达出恋人之间的亲密感，就像“甜心”，也能表达对非恋人的喜爱之情。流行歌手菲瑞和麦莉•塞勒斯把这个词用在他们的歌曲中，之后“bae”变成了主流词汇。



Some people might think that millennial slang debases the English language, but Melbourne University linguist Rosey Billington doesn’t agree.

有人或许认为，零零后的俚语拉低了英语的档次，不过墨尔本大学的语言学家罗赛•比林顿却持不同观点。

“When you are able to use language in a creative way, you show you are linguistically savvy because you know the language rules well enough to use words in a different way,” Billington says in an interview with News.com.au.

比林顿在接受News.com.au网站采访时说：“当你能创造性地使用一种语言，这说明你有很高的语言悟性，因为非常了解语言规则，你才能花式造词。”

Her view is echoed by two linguists, Lauren Spradlin and Taylor Jones, from the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania respectively. The two analyzed hundreds of examples of totes-speak. They discovered that totesing has remarkably complex roots.

纽约市立大学的语言学家劳伦•斯普来林和宾夕法尼亚大学语言学家泰勒•琼斯同意比林顿的观点。他们发现网络缩略词都有相当复杂的词源。



It isn’t simply an adult version of baby talk, nor is it a clever way to minimize your word count on social media. Rather, totes-speak is a highly organized system that relies on a speaker’s mastery of English pronunciation.

它绝不是简单的成年人版儿语，也不单单是社交媒体上减少用词字数的聪明之举。相反，它依赖于说话者娴熟地掌握英语发音，是一种高度组织化的系统。

The ability to break apart syllables and mash different sounds together is key. For example, “people disagree on whether ‘casual’ becomes caj, cazh or cajs, but they all agree on how to pronounce the shortened word.”

拆分音节和重组不同发音的能力是关键。比如，“大家对‘casual’简化为caj，cazh，还是cajs莫衷一是，但是在缩写的发音问题上却不谋而合。”

“Totesing is about sounds, and it conforms to the sometimes complicated sound system of English,” Jones tells The Washington Post in an interview. Totesing is not random. On the contrary, it has strict rules to follow. You need to be very fluent in the English language to be able to grasp totes-speak.

“网络缩略词是关于语音的，它又是遵照复杂的英语语音系统，”琼斯在采访中告诉《华盛顿邮报》。网络缩略词并非凭空捏造，相反，它遵循了严格的规则。只有当你的英语十分流利的时候，你才能掌握它。