Lesson One
1.And it is an activity only of humans.
And conversation is an activity found only among human beings.
2.Conversation is not for making a point.
Conversation is not for persuading others to accept our ideas or points of views.
3.In fact, the best conversationalists are those who are prepared to lose.
In fact , people who are good at conversation will not argue to win or force others to accept his ideas.
4.Bar friends are not deeply involved in each other’s lives.
People who meet each other for a drink in the bar of a pub are not close friends for they are not deeply absorbed in each other’s private lives.
5.....it could still go ignorantly on ...
The conversation could go on without anybody knowing who was right or wrong.
6.There are cattle in the fields ,but we sit down to beef.
These animals are called cattle when they are alive and feed in the fields , but when we sit down at the table to eat, we call their meet beef.
7.The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French against
his own language.
The new ruling class by using French instead of English made it hard for the English to accept or absorb the culture of the rulers.
8.English had come royally into its own.
English received proper recognition and was used by the King once more.
9.The phrase has always been used a little pejoratively and even facetiously by the lower
classes.
The phrase , the King’s English ,has always been used disrespectfully and jokingly by the lower classes.(The working people often mock the proper and formal language of the educated people.)
10.The rebellion against a cultural dominance is still there.
As the early Saxon peasants , the working people still have a spirit of opposition to the cultural authority of the ruling class.
11.There is always a great danger that “ words will harden into things for us. “
There is always a great danger , as Carlyle put it , that we might forget that words are only symbols and take them for things they are supposed to represent.
Translation
a.However intricate the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not indulge
in anything that deserves the name of conversation.
不管动物之间的交流方式多么复杂，它们不能参与到称得上是交谈的任何活动中。
b.Argument may often be a part of it, but the purpose of the argument is not to convince. There
is no winning in conversation.
争论会经常出现于交谈中，但争论的目的不是为了说服。交谈中没有胜负之说。
c.Perhaps it is because of my upbringing in English pubs that I think bar conversation has
a charm of its own.
或许我从小就混迹于英国酒吧缘故，我认为酒吧里的闲聊别有韵味。
d.I do not remember what made one of our companions say it ---she clearly had not come into
the bar to say it , it was not something that was pressing on her mind---but her remark fell quite naturally into the talk.
我不记得是什么使得我的一个同伴说起它来的---她显然不是来酒吧说这个的，这不是她事先想好的话题----但她的话相当自然地插入到了交谈中。
e.There is always resistance in the lower classes to any attempt by an upper class to lay down
rules for “English as it should be spoken .”
下层社会总会抵制上层社会企图给“标准英语”制定得规则。
f.Words are not themselves a reality ,but only representations of it ,and the King’s
English ,like the Anglo-French of the Normans , is a class representation of reality.
词语本身并不是现实。正如诺曼底人讲的英格鲁--法语一样，标准英语是一个阶层用来表达现实的形式。
g.Perhaps it is worth trying to speak it, but it should not be laid down as an edict , and
made immune to change from below.
或许试着去说它还是值得的，但是它不能被制定成法令，从而拒绝来自下层的变化。
h.There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he speaks as
if he were writing , or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print.
如果一个人说出的话就像写出来的文字，或者试图使用那些创作书面散文的文字，那么没有比这样的交谈者更糟糕的了。
i.When E.M. Forster writes of “ the sinister corridor of our age,” we sit up at the vividness
of the phrase , the force and even terror in the image.
