某个荒无人烟的小镇

某个荒无人烟的小镇

It happens on every road trip — you're driving from city to city, natural wonder to natural wonder. Every hour is a magical combination of rustic beauty and historic landmarks and fascinating people.

每次公路之旅都会发生这种情况--你开车从一个城市到另一个城市，从一个自然奇观到另一个自然奇观。每个小时都是乡村美景、历史地标和很棒的人的神奇结合。

Until, one day, things change: The scenery turns gray; the people lose their charm. You find yourself at a rest stop with no toilet paper. It's 90 miles to the nearest motel.

直到有一天，一切都变了:风景变得黯淡;人们失去魅力。你发现自己在一个没有卫生纸的休息站。离最近的汽车旅馆有90英里。

Akin to "nowheresville" and "hicksville," people use "Podunk" as a stand-in for anywhere they think doesn't have much going on.

与“nowheresville”和“hicksville”类似，人们用“Podunk”代替他们认为没什么大不了的地方。

It's a depressing place: bleak, empty, isolated. The people there are probably a little creepy. Any good thing that happens there is highly unexpected (I was in some Podunk town in God-knows-where when I heard that my grandson got engaged!).

这是一个令人沮丧的地方:荒凉、空旷、与世隔绝。那里的人可能有点吓人。那里如果发生好事那是非常出乎意料的(我是在一个鬼才知道的荒无人烟的小镇上听说我孙子订婚的消息的!)

A common implication of Podunk is that it's a place so dreary and remote that it's not even worth situating on a map.

公众对Podunk的定义是一个枯燥和偏远的地方，甚至不值得在地图上标出来。

But there are a couple of things that people who use the term probably don't know. First, Podunk is the name of a few real towns. There's a Podunk in Connecticut, one in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts.

但是有几件事，用这个词的人可能不知道。首先，Podunk是几个真实存在的城镇的名字。康涅狄格州有一个，纽约州有一个，佛蒙特州有一个，马萨诸塞州有一个。

The Connecticut Podunk is well-known (OK, not that well-known) for an annual bluegrass festival. And folks who live in the various Podunks are pretty well-practiced at pushing back against its common usage.

康涅狄格的Podunk以一年一度的蓝草音乐节而闻名(好吧，不是那么有名)。住在各处的Podunks的人都很反驳它的常用用法。

In 1981, someone took The New York Times to task for publishing a Podunk-bashing cartoon. The cartoon, Francis H. Schaefer Jr. wrote, "is a slur to the Podunk. ... Our Podunk may be no more than a junction in the road, with a population of 30 at tops, but it is definitely a real place."

1981年，有人指责《纽约时报》刊登了一幅抨击podunk的漫画。小弗朗西斯·h·谢弗写道，这幅漫画“是对Podunk的诋毁……我们的Podunk可能只是路上的一个枢纽，最多有30个人，但它绝对是一个真实的地方。”

The other thing people likely don't know? Podunk was a place name before it became a punchline. Podunk is an Algonquian word. Algonquian languages are a family of indigenous languages spoken from New England to Saskatchewan to the Great Plains.

人们可能不知道的另一件事是什么?Podunk在成为笑柄之前是一个地名。Podunk是一个阿尔冈琴语。阿尔冈琴语是从新英格兰到萨斯喀彻温到大平原的一个土著语言。

Those languages include Fox, Cree and Ojibwe. There are a bunch of words in English that have Algonquian roots: skunk, moose, caribou. And according to Arok Wolvengrey, a professor of Algonquian languages and linguistics at First Nations University of Canada, many of those languages are in danger.

这些语言包括Fox, Cree和Ojibwe。英语中有很多单词的词根都与阿尔冈琴语有关:skunk(臭鼬)、moose(驼鹿)、caribou(驯鹿)。根据加拿大第一民族大学阿尔冈琴语言和语言学教授阿洛克沃温格林的说法，这些语言中的许多都处于危险之中。

"Half of those [languages] might be gone within a hundred years," he says. "And we've already suffered a fairly large loss just in the last 500 years in the Americas."

“这些(语言)中有一半可能在一百年内消失，”他说。“在美洲国家过去的500年里，我们（的语言）已经遭受了相当大的损失。”

But beyond its Algonquian roots, much of the linguistic history of Podunk is kind of murky.

但是除了它的阿尔冈琴词根之外，Podunk的语言历史还有很多不为人知的地方。

"We have no idea what the word means," says Ives Goddard, senior linguist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and a leading expert on Algonquian languages. "You'll be able to find guesses in the sources if you look around. Don't believe any of it."

“我们不知道这个词是什么意思，”史密森学会的资深语言学家、阿尔冈琴语系的主要专家艾夫斯·戈达德说。“如果你四处看看，就能在资料来源中找到猜想。但别全相信这些。”

He hadn't known that Podunk was an Algonquian word before we got in touch, but he said he didn't think there was anything particularly sinister about its use.

在我们联系他之前，他并不知道Podunk是一个阿尔冈琴词，但他说他并不认为这个词的用法有什么特别凶兆的地方。

Wolvengrey says there are obviously words that "reflect a racist attitude towards indigenous people" — but Podunk doesn't seem to be one of them. And, he adds, there are all kinds of words for places, both negative and positive, that get detached from their original meaning: Shangri-La, for instance, or Xanadu: "Words have interesting histories. They can deteriorate and they can sometimes become much stronger than they were in the first place."

沃温格林说，很明显，有些词“反映了对土著人的种族主义态度”，但Podunk似乎不在其中。而且，他补充说，有各种各样的表示地方的词，有褒义的，也有贬义的，它们都脱离了原意:例如，香格里拉，或者世外桃源。词语有有趣的历史，它们可能会被恶化，有时还会比原来的意义变得更强。”