my life 我的生活.doc

my life 我的生活As a boy Id have been in dead trouble if Id ever used the name of Jesus as a swear word at home. Blasphemy just wasnt tolerated, even though my parents were non-believers. The boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable language are shifting all the time. John Terry, for instance, has just been acquitted in court of racial abuse. But when I started out as a court reporter many years ago, the mere uttering of a very rude word would have been enough to get you arrested, without racial connotations.作为一个男孩，如果我要是用耶稣的名字来骂脏话的话，我会陷入很大的麻烦中。尽管我的父母不是信徒，亵渎神明是完全不被容许的。可接受的语言和不可接受的语言之间的界限一直在变。 例如，约翰?特里刚刚在种族歧视法庭被无罪释放。但我很多年前开始做法院书记官时，仅仅说一个粗鲁的词，即使没有种族上的隐含意义，也足以让你被逮捕。I remember how the alleged word could never be said out loud, and had to be ceremoniously written down by the witness, usually a police officer. The paper was then folded and handed to the magistrate, who carefully unfolded it and duly looked shocked, all in disapproving silence. The most offensive swear words used to be religious rather than sexual. They contravene the Commandment Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, which was seen as blasphemy. That was so serious, in fact, that a whole coded language was developed so that people could go on swearing and yet stay away from the stocks, or the gallows, where open blasphemy mightve put them.我记得，当时证词都不能大声说出来，必须由证人（通常是一名警察）正式地写下来。然后文件会被折叠起来，交给地方法官。法官会小心的打开文件，然后随即会被他所看到的震惊。这一切都是在一种不赞成的寂静中进行的。 最无礼的脏话通常与宗教有关，而不是与性有关。它们违反了 “你不可徒然地采用耶和华的名字”的戒律，因为这会被看作是亵渎神灵。实际上，这后果太严重了，以至于人们发展处了一套暗语。它可以使人们能够继续骂脏话，而同时又可以远离手脚枷或是绞刑架，而如果公开亵渎神灵的话，就会是这样的下场。This is technically known as the process of mincing, as in the phrase mincing your words. It disguises the words origins just enough to keep the swearer clear of the law. Swearing offers us a brief glimpse of the religious history of our country. Before the 16th century Protestant Reformation, ordinary people would commonly have referred to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Our Lady, as Roman Catholics still do. Hence the oath By Our Lady, which was minced into the swearword bloody, has to be at least 500 years old. Another familiar swearword refers to the Albigensian heresy in the 13th century. Other examples of minced oaths include the now harmless cripes or crikey, which were disguised forms of the word Christ. Blimey originally meant God Blind Me! which was a way of invoking divine punishment if Im not telling the truth, so youd better believe me. A few religious swearwords are still on the banned list, so Im not going to tell you what they are. Others have dropped out altogether. Outsidecomic books, nobody says Zounds! any more, which was a minced version of By Gods Wounds, a reference to the Crucifixion and clearly of Mediaeval origin.这在技术上被称作“mincing（矫饰）”，如在短语“mincing your words（说话不要拐弯抹角）”中的意思一样。它伪饰单词的起源，使得脏话能够不受法律的限制。 脏话可以让我们简要地了解我们国家的宗教历史。在16世纪宗教改革之前，普通人通常会称圣母玛利亚为“Our Lady（圣母玛利亚）”，而罗马的天主教徒如今仍这么做。因此，誓言“By Our Lady（圣母作证）”，后来被委婉地改成了脏话“bloody（该死的）”。所以这个脏话至少有500年的历史了。另一个熟悉的脏话是指13世纪的阿尔比派异教的。还有一些被矫饰过的脏话的例子，如现在已经无害的“cripes（天啊）”或“crikey（哎呀）”，这两个词都由“Christ（基督）”伪装而来。“Blimey（啊呀）”原来是指“God Blind Me！（上帝使我盲目）”，是用来表达“如果我没说实话的话，就让上帝惩罚我，所以你最好相信我！”的一种方式。 有些与宗教有关的脏话如今仍然是禁止说的，所以我不会告诉你们它们是什么。其它一些脏话已经过时。除了漫画书，没人再说“Zounds!（咄）”。这是“By Gods Wounds（上帝的伤口）”的委婉版，意指上帝在十字架受难，很明显是起源于中世纪。Just as churches are such a familiar part of our visible local landscape you hardly notice they are there, so profane oaths and swearwords are part of our everyday verbal landscape, and again we hardly notice them. But the fact that we still know theyre not polite, to say the least, means we havent completely lost track of where they came from.正如教堂是我们当地风景中熟悉的一部分，所以我们很难注意到它们的存在一样，亵渎神灵的一些诅咒和脏话也是我们日常口语中的一部分，所以我们很难注意到它们。但事实上，我们仍然知道它们是不礼貌的。这至少意味着我们还没有完全忘记它们的起源。It was the late 70s and we thought him almost a god, my school friends Helen and Anne and I. An actor-director undergraduate, impossibly tall, dark and drop dead gorgeous, he co-hosted a party every summer for which all the guests had to dress in white. Everything he did was cool and desirable. Until, in the 80s, a killer disease from America swept through the beautiful people like a scythe, and left him a wasted skeleton in a hospital bed. Anne managed to visit him and I meant to, really I did. But I couldnt quite believe there wasnt plenty of time. You see he seemed incapable, but incapable, of doing anything disagreeable.We need to be more Christian to one another over AIDS, Elton John said yesterday. An interesting phrase, given Mr Johns introduction to this once devastating scourge.他那时是演员兼导演专业的学生，皮肤黝黑、英俊高大。每年夏天他都会联合举办一次社交聚会，到场的来宾都必须身着白色衣服。他做的每一件事都十分出色、令人满意。直到八十年代，一种致命的疾病如镰刀般击倒了这位完美的人，他躺在医院的病床上，被病痛折磨成了一个骨瘦如柴的废人。安妮去看望了他，尽管我也十分想去，但我无法接受他将不久于人世。你也许觉得他看上去什么事也做不了，但他不会去做令人生厌的事。昨日，艾尔顿约翰说在艾滋病的问题上，我们必须“像基督徒一样更加仁慈对待彼此”。考虑到约翰初次接触这一度被视为是毁灭性的灾难时的情形，他这样的表述十分有意思。In 1985 he first read about and then met a brave young haemophiliac, Ryan White. When a journalist revealed that Ryan was dying of AIDS, not only was he banned from school and a judicial restraining order put on him to the cheers of neighbours, but his own church required him to sit in a separate pew, and on Easter Day no one in the congregation would shake his hand as a sign of peace. If this is the behaviour of the church, why should we want to be more Christian towards one another? We hardly have an impeccable record, do we? Once when we had reached a very low ebb as a family, I asked my husband, in despair, Why should we go on believing, when God doesnt answer prayer and Christians can behave worse than anybody? All he said in reply was this. Look at the character of Jesus. Who else do you think He could have been? Not Christian theology. Far less the behaviour of Christian sinners like ourselves. But the character of Christ.1985年，约翰读到关于血友病患者瑞安怀特的报道，并和他见面。当记者透露瑞安死于艾滋病时，约翰不仅被学校拒之门外，还收到了法律禁令，他的邻居都为此欣喜不已，就连他所在的教堂都要求他坐在单独的长椅上。到了复活节，会众中没有一个人跟他握手言和。如果这就是教堂的所作所为，为何我们要更“像基督徒”那样对待彼此呢？人无完人，不是吗？家庭遇到困境时，我曾绝望地问丈夫“既然上帝都不去回应人们的祷告，基督徒可以比任何人都要无情，为什么还要继续我们的信仰呢？”他的回答是：“看看耶稣的品格，你觉得除了他还有谁可以是上帝？”使他成为上帝的不是基督教所信仰的理论，更不是我们这有罪过的基督教徒的言行，而是基督的品格。My godmother gave me a Bible, in red tooled leather, which I had throughout my childhood and have still. At that moment I thought of its garish, dated childrens pictures, a shepherd with long hair and a lamb across His shoulders. Who else could He have been? Its true, He could be angry. He was capable of condemning. He even talked of Judgement. But its not for this that we remember Him. We remember a Man who loved a sex worker for indecently wiping His feet with her loose hair, who publicly befriended a fraudster worse than any recently discredited banker, who cured those whose illnesses made them even more untouchable than Ryan, ostracised by his society. Elton Johns book is provocatively entitled, Love is the Cure. Not medicine, or science, or technology, it is love for which this God is known above all, extending an invitation into His kingdom to a terrorist hanging by His side. As Elton John said, Jesus, like Ryan who followed Him, loved and forgave unconditionally and died for the sake of others. A death even more disagreeable than my friends all those years ago.我的教母曾给了我一本红色书皮的圣经，我从儿时一直保存到现在。我想到书中艳丽、陈旧的儿童图画，上面画着长发的牧羊人，肩上坐着一只羊羔。除了他谁还能是上帝？的确，他可以发怒。他能做出审判。他甚至提到过裁决。但我们不是因此才纪念他。我们纪念的是一个男人：当性工作者不雅地用蓬乱的头发擦试他双脚时，他给予她爱；遇到名声比任何名誉扫地的银行家都要恶劣的诈骗犯时，他公然和他成为朋友；有人因疾病受到比瑞安更甚的排斥，他为他们治疗。艾尔顿约翰为他的书起了一个有争议性的标题，爱是良药。并非药物，并非科学技术，而是爱让上帝为世人所知晓，让他邀请被绞死在他身侧的恐怖分子来到他的国度。正如艾尔顿约翰所说，瑞安所追随的耶稣“无条件的热爱并宽恕着人们，为他人献身”，这样的死亡比数年前朋友去世更令人难受。The Bibles boring, everyone knows that. Phares begat Esrom and Esrom begat Aram and Aram begat Aminadab. When I was teaching public bible reading in our church, I made the lesson readers practice with a telephone directory, to learn how to make it interesting. Suddenly entrance, ancestry has become fascinating, as anyone gripped by Britains DNA Project on this programme yesterday will agree. Scientists believe, through mitochondrial DNA that we can now trace ourselves back to one woman, aptly dubbed Eve, living in Central Africa in 190000 BC, that nine people in the UK have the same DNA marker as the Queen of Sheba would have had, who visited King Solomon in the Book of Kings, and that 90% of men called Cohen all share the same sequence, some calling themselves sons of Aaron, older brother to Moses and the first High Priest. Time was when only toffs could trace their ancestry, the rest of us being too insignificant to have written records.众所周知，圣经趣味性不强。法勒斯生希斯仑，希斯仑生亚兰，亚兰生亚米拿达。我以前在教堂里教公众阅读圣经的时候，让学生们对着电话薄练习，尝试让课程变得有意思。 大家被世系深深地吸引了，这真有些让人始料未及。但凡昨天被该项目的英国DNA计划感兴趣的人都会同意这一点。科学家相信借住线粒体DNA，我们发现自己的祖宗是一位公元19万年前的女人，她生活在中部非洲，姑且称之为夏娃吧。在英国，有9个人可能与列王记中拜访所罗门王的示巴女王的DNA标记相同。在所有叫科恩的男性中，90%的人序列相同，他们有些自称是亚伦，摩西的兄长、首任大祭司的后代。 曾几何时，只有富人才可以追溯世系，其他人无足轻重，没有任何书面记录。Now, thanks to the Internet, many of us are finding our forebears, and are as proud of under-scullery-maids and transported convicts as of those who fought with the Conqueror. Recently my father gave our daughters fiance my mothers engagement ring. It is apt as well as moving that she should wear it, having inherited her grandmothers sweet nature as well as her formidable brains. It prompted me to find out more about my own ring, given to my husband by my mother Marys sister, my dear aunt Jane. The last person to wear it before me was Mary Jane, my great-grandmother, who emigrated from Scotland to Australia aged six and became an accomplished art student in Melbourne in the mid 19th century. We have two of her beautiful paintings, and Im even more inspired by her feminist professionalism, in such an era, than by her talent. We become the people we come from, which is why its so right that adopted children may now trace their biological families. Genealogies are there because they are not only compelling but critical. At the weekend our nine year old and I read the thrilling Book of Ruth, ending with the bombshell that this poor displaced and desperate immigrant, became grandmother to David, the great King of the Jews. Almost, the greatest.如今，在互联网的帮助下，很多人都可以找到自己的祖先，既为与征服者威廉一起战斗的人骄傲，也为在厨房里洗洗涮涮的婢女、被运往他乡的囚徒骄傲。 近日，我爸爸把我妈妈的订婚戒指送给了我女儿的未婚夫。这件事真是又合适、又让人感动，因为我的女儿将会戴上这枚戒指，继承她祖母的美好品质、聪明的头脑。我也开始了解我自己的这枚戒指。我婆婆玛丽的妹妹，简婶婶把它交给了我丈夫，我丈夫把它戴在我的手上。上一个戴这戒指的人是玛丽简，我们的曾祖母。她六岁时从苏格兰移民澳大利亚，19世纪中期在墨尔本成为了一名杰出的美术专业学生。我们收藏了两幅她的作品，十分漂亮。与其说是她的才能，不如说是她的信念激励。她在那个年代就主张女性应当有自己的职业。 我们的祖先是什么样的，我们就是什么样的。