12月外刊推文：The word of 2022: Hybrid work

小重

01 选文来源：The Economist-20221214期 The word of 2022: Hybrid work
Johnson’s choice is neither clever nor lovely. But it is hugely consequential.
02 推荐理由：
年度热词系列，管中窥豹。
回望新冠三年，悲观的人会被虚无主义淹没，觉得世界是个人工搭建的乐园。
名望、金钱、享乐，都可以在瞬息之间被摧毁...众生平等，大家都是时间的管家。
乐观的人选择接受，用一种乐得自在的态度随波逐流。
从实体店到虚拟商铺，从工位到居家办公，人们的工作方式得到了前所未有的革新。
是避免了通勤的苦，还是迎来了从未离岗的long lasting的torture？很难评价。
03 原文阅读：
【Para 1】The story of a year is sometimes easy to identify: the financial crisis of 2008, the Brexit-Trump populist wave of 2016 or the pandemic of 2020. The most wrenching event of 2022 has been the war in Ukraine, yet those earlier stories have lingered in the headlines. For language-watchers, all that meant much new vocabulary to consider.
【Para 2】Ukraine war obliged newsreaders to practise place-names from Kharkiv to Zaporizhia. It also introduced weapons previously known only to experts: MANPADS, NASAMS, HIMARS and the like. (Soldiers have long had a flair for acronyms, not just the official kind but in contributions likefubarandsnafu.) A debate also developed about whether it is culturally or militarily appropriate to refer to kamikaze or suicide drones, drones being by definition pilotless. Loitering munitions lacks a certain snap.
【Para 3】The economic problems to which the war contributed brought new words too. The catchiest in that subcategory is shrinkflation, whereby companies hide price increases by downsizing products while keeping price tags unchanged. It is a perfect portmanteau (a word built from parts of others). It not only points to an important thing, but its component parts are transparent so that it requires little explanation. No wonder Shaquille O’Neal, a retired American basketball star, used it in a pizza advertisement—a measure of success, perhaps. Climate change also contributed vocabulary in 2022, a year of extreme weather and eco-anxiety. A torrid summer saw governments set up public cooling centres. Come the winter, soaring fuel prices introduced their cold-weather equivalents, warm banks. At the cop27 climate-change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, loss and damage took centre stage. Rich countries, whose industrialisation has largely caused climate change, promised to set up a fund to redress the harms already done, or certain to be done, in poorer ones. Loss and damage becomes a new pillar in climate politics, alongside limiting further change (mitigation) and making countries more resilient (adaptation).
【Para 4】Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021 and spent vast sums in 2022 trying to activate the metaverse, an online world in which people can interact via avatars and virtual-reality goggles. Instead profits drooped as the company struggled even to get its employees to inhabit its metaverse. The word was a finalist in Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year contest, but was not selected. Perhaps another year. This is still a word (and a world) looking for users.
【Para 5】Instead, Oxford’s choice this year—based on a public vote—was goblin mode, a state in which people indulge their laziest or most selfish habits. After years of covid, recession and inflation, people are tired and frazzled and finding it harder to keep up appearances. But another product of the covid era is Johnson’s word of the year.
【Para 6】After the lockdowns of 2020, followed, in 2021, by a slow return to the office, 2022 was the year that hybrid work settled in. Working at home some of the time has advantages (decongesting cities and fewer painful commutes), and disadvantages (fears of lower productivity combined with a sense of never being off duty). In the spring Twitter announced a policy of unlimited working from home for those who wanted it. When Elon Musk bought the company he promptly decreed the opposite. But most firms have not gone to either extreme, instead trying to find the best of both worlds.
【Para 7】As a coinage, hybrid work is no beauty. But it will reshape cities, careers, family life and free time. That is ample qualification for a word of the year.
04 翻译练习：
【原文】After the lockdowns of 2020, followed, in 2021, by a slow return to the office, 2022was the year that hybrid work settled in. Working at home some of the time has advantages (decongesting cities and fewer painful commutes), and disadvantages (fears of lower productivity combined with a sense of never being off duty). In the spring Twitter announced a policy of unlimited working from home for those who wanted it. When Elon Musk bought the company he promptly decreed the opposite. But most firms have not gone to either extreme, instead trying to find the best of both worlds.
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记得翻完再对答案哦

【参考译文】如果说2020年是封城时代，2021年是重回线下办公时代，那么2022年则是“混合办公”（hybrid work）时代。居家办公有时是优点（缓解交通拥堵、减少痛苦通勤的频率）有时是缺点（既担心办公效率下降，又有种始终处于工作状态的错觉）。今年春季，推特宣布允许员工选择一直居家办公，但马斯克在收购了推特后便立马推出了“强制返岗令”。不过大多数公司都没有走极端，而是试图在线下办公与居家办公之间找到最佳平衡点。