时髦英语口语词汇讲解第44期:W00t! 耶!

Now here's a curious word.
这里有个奇怪的单词。

You probably didn't notice but the middle two characters are numbers, not letters, and this gives us a clue as to where the word came from originally - but more of that in a while.
大家也许没有注意到，中间的两个字符是数字而不是字母哦。这样的话呢，我们就大概可以知道这个单词最初是怎么形成的——我们等会儿会讲到这一点。

So, how does this word sound to you?
听起来怎么样呢？

Let me say it again...'w00t!' Does it sound happy? It should do.
我再念一遍：w00t（表示惊讶感叹）！听起来兴高采烈吗？应该是。

When the Merriam-Webster dictionary chose it as their word of the year for 2007, they described it as 'expressing joy... similar to the word 'yay!''
韦氏字典将这个单词评选为‘2007年度词’，并将其定义为‘表达高兴……跟单词yay类似’。

The kind of thing you say when you win something, or when something good happens to you:
是大家在赢得了什么东西或者遇到某种好事的时候会说的一个单词。

W00t! I passed all my exams!
W00t（耶）!我考试全过了！

So why are there two zeros in the middle of this expression?
话说回来，为什么这个单词中间会有两个0呢？

Well, w00t! is widely believed to have originated in the online gaming community where teams compete to overcome other teams.
嗯，据说w00t最初来源于网络上的游戏玩家——在游戏社区，游戏团队都想打败别的团队。

Beating another team means that you 'own' them, and from there we get the bacronym (a phrase constructed after the fact) of 'we own the other team'.
打败了别的团队就意为着拥有了这支团队，这就形成了我们今天的缩略词w00t——在‘we own the other team’这件事发生之后所形成的一个词w00t（bacronym相当于首字母缩略词acronym，但是不同的是bacronym一般是用一个已经为大家所熟悉的单词来表示几个单词，如halt=Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired）。

However, gamers speak another language to the rest of us - they speak 1337 (leet, from 'elite') where words are written using different characters and numbers - just to confuse middle-aged people like me.
但是，玩游戏的人跟我们说的语言是完全不同的，他们(通常用类似的数字和符号来代替字母，创造他们自己的黑客语——l33tspeak)说的是黑客语（leet——leet来源于单词‘精英’elite），黑客语的单词是由字母和数字组成的，真的很让我们这样的中年人迷惑不解。

So, 'we own the other team' becomes 'woot' and then is transposed in leet to 'w00t!'. Simple, really.
也就是说，we own the other team变成了woot，然后又变化成了leet黑客语w00t。很简单，真的！

Keen scholars will find the word 'woot' used in Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale, meaning 'to know', and you'll also find it in pop songs from the early nineties and various different online forums,
热心的学者会在乔叟的The Wife of Bath's Tale发现单词woot，为‘了解’的意思，大家也会在90年代早期的流行音乐中遇见这个单词，还有就是网上的很多论坛上。

but it is the gaming usage which has captured the popular imagination.
但是，这种词在游戏行业的用法才真正使大家发挥了无限的想象。

As Merriam-Webster's president John Morse points out, 'it blends whimsy and technology'.
正像韦氏字典的创始人John Morse指出的那样，这个单词综合了奇思异想和技术含量。