时髦英语口语词汇讲解第48期:Wicked! 真牛!

Wicked! Note the intonation.
Wicked！大家注意一下这里的语气！

It means 'wonderful', 'great', 'cool', 'splendid'.
这个词的意思是‘太棒了/棒极了/酷毙了/真牛！’

It came into English from United States' black slang in the 1980s or maybe earlier.
这个词在上个世纪80年代或者更早的时候来自美国黑人俚语。

Certainly it arrived in Britain in the late 1980s.
当然，它是在上个世纪80年代晚期才出现在英国的。

It was part of a trend which goes back decades to use bad words to mean good concepts, or the other way round.
这在当时是一种潮流，那就是用不好的词语来表示好的意念，或者用好的词来表示‘不好’这个概念。

I mean you might remember saying, 'that's great!' meaning 'it isn't great'.
我的意思是说，你也学还记得你曾说过‘that's great!’，来表示‘这下可好！’

And always there's been this use of the word 'naughty' to mean'nice'.
我们也总是用naughty这个词来表示‘很不错’这个意思。

So it's part of a general trend.
这是一种潮流的一部分。

It's mainly used as an adjective in front of a noun, you know, 'we had a wicked time!'
这个词主要被当作形容词来放在名词前面进行修饰，例如，我们度过了非常愉快的时间。

Or, of course, you can use it on its own, just saying, you know, 'wicked!' as a reaction - that's how youngsters use it.
或者，大家当然也可以单独使用‘wicked’——酷毙了！年轻人就是这样使用的。

And youngsters, of course, knowing that grown ups are now using it as well, have decided to use other bad words in the same sort of way - I've heard from young people in recent years, the last couple of years, words like 'evil' meaning 'good', you see, or 'brutal' meaning 'good'.
但是，当然啦，年轻人知道大人们也在用这个词，所以他们决定用同样的方式来使用其它的贬义词。我最近几年（过去数年来）有听过年轻人说过像是evil（了不起）或者brutal（太好了！）。

Wicked is still around.
Wicked现在还在被使用。

It's meant, of course, that the traditional sense of wicked is now being squeezed out, much as 'gay' made it difficult to use the traditional sense of 'merry' or 'cheerful' when it started to be used in reference to homosexuals.
它的意思，它在传统上的意思已经消匿了，就像单词gay，当它开始被人们来指代同性恋的时候，人们就已经很难使用它的传统意思‘快乐的’了。

So with wicked, tone of voice is the only way to make the distinction between the old meaning and the new meaning, and even that's ambiguous sometimes, so you have to be careful, and pay very careful attention to the context.
使用单词wicked的时候，说话的语气是区分新旧意思的关键。但是，这个有时候也是让人混淆不清的。所以大家使用的时候要小心，要十分注意前后的语境。

And notice that the word is extending its use.
还需注意，这个词的词义还在扩大。

The other day, for the first time, I heard somebody say, 'wicked cool' meaning 'very cool'.
前几天我就第一次听到有人说‘wicked cool'，意思就是‘非常酷’。