華爾街日報好文： 致2012畢業生們 (帶中、英生詞解釋）

1）請大家看完后給個反饋：這樣的解說對你有幫助嗎？應該如何改進？
2）所有的 " ( = English 或 中文 )" 部分都是我加的生詞解釋。所有的下劃線部分、註釋也是我加上的，不是原作者的。



To the Class of 2012
Attention graduates: Tonedown your egos, shape up your minds.
By BRET STEPHENS

Dear Class of 2012:

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions (=efforts) that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated (=充氣的) grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased (= of little or no value/use) degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of (= 托XX的福) the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back (=到頭來卻把你接回家來了) — return-to-sender (=退還給發件人), forwarding address unknown (=轉遞地址不詳).

No doubt some of you have overcome real hardships or taken real degrees. A couple of years ago I hired a summer intern （= 實習生）from West Point （西點軍校）. She came to the office directly from weeks of field exercises （=實戰演習）in which she kept a bulletproof vest (=防彈背心) on at all times, even while sleeping. She writes brilliantly and is as self-effacing (平易近人、「不拿自己當回事」） as she is accomplished （不僅出色，而且平易可親）. Now she's in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban.

If you're like that intern, please feel free to feel sorry for yourself. Just remember she doesn't.

Unfortunately, dear graduates, chances are you're nothing like her. And since you're no longer children, at least officially, it's time someone tells you the facts of life. The other facts (other = 另類的、以前別人可能沒怎麼告訴過你的）.

Fact One is that, in our "knowledge-based" economy, knowledge counts. Yet here you are, probably the least knowledgeable graduating class in history.

A few months ago, I interviewed a young man with an astonishingly high GPA from an Ivy League university and aspirations to write about Middle East politics. We got on the subject of the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was vaguely familiar with it. But he didn't know who was president of the United States in 1956. And he didn't know who succeeded that president.

Pop quiz, Class of '12: Do you?

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn't to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely (=very often, very regularly) interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.

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Now to Fact Two: Your competition is global. Shape up. Don't end your days like a man I met a few weeks ago in Florida, complaining that Richard Nixon had caused his New York City business to fail by opening up China.

In places like Ireland, France, India and Spain, your most talented and ambitious peers (=同齡人) are graduating into economies even more depressed (= troubled, bad) than America's. Unlike you, they probably speak several languages. They may also have a degree in a hard science or engineering—skills that transfer easily to the more remunerative (=profitable, financially rewarding 有利可圖的) jobs in investment banks or global consultancies.

I know a lot of people like this from my neighborhood in New York City, and it's a good thing they're so well-mannered because otherwise they'd be eating our lunch. But if things continue as they are, they might soon be eating yours.

Which reminds me of Fact Three: Your prospective (=potential, 潛在的) employers can smell BS (=bull shit / bullshit 牛糞 = 扯淡、胡扯) from miles away. And most of you don't even know how badly you stink.

When did puffery (=吹起冒泡、胡侃亂吹) become the American way? Probably around the time Norman Mailer came out with "Advertisements for Myself." But at least that was in the service of provoking an establishment that liked to cultivate an ideal of emotional restraint and public reserve.

To read through your CVs, dear graduates, is to be assaulted by endless Advertisements for Myself. Here you are, 21 or 22 years old, claiming to have accomplished feats (=triumphs, victories) in past summer internships or at your school newspaper that would be hard to credit in a biography of Walter Lippmann or Ernie Pyle (1).

If you're not too bright, you may think this kind of nonsense goes undetected (=not found out); if you're a little brighter, you probably figure everyone does it so you must as well.

But the best of you don't do this kind of thing at all. You have an innate sense of modesty. You're confident that your résumé needs no embellishment (=過分的裝飾點綴). You understand that less is more.

In other words, you're probably capable of thinking for yourself. And here's Fact Four: There will always be a market for people who can do that.

In every generation there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else. But your generation has an especially bad case, because your mass conformism (=大規模的、群體的從眾行為) is masked by the appearance of mass nonconformism (大規模的、群體的特立獨行). It's a point I learned from my West Point intern, when I asked her what it was like to lead such a uniformed existence.

Her answer stayed with me: Wearing a uniform, she said, helped her figure out what it was that really distinguished her as an individual.

Now she's a second lieutenant (=少尉) , leading a life of meaning and honor, figuring out how to Think Different (2) for the sake of a cause that counts (一項有實際意義的事業). Not many of you will be able to follow in her precise footsteps, nor do you need to do so. But if you can just manage to tone down your egos (=放低自吹自擂的調門), shape up your minds, and think unfashionable (=不合主流、不合時宜、不時髦的) thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good luck!


Write to bstephens@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 8, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: To the Class of 2012.


Footnotes:
(1) Walter Lippman:  1889 – 1974, American public intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator.  Ernie Pyle: 1900 -- 1945, American journalist and writer whose works appeared in about 300 newspapers.

(2) A reference to Apple Computer's 1997 "Think Different" advertising campaign. The following was its TV commercial copy: 「Here』s to the crazy ones. The misfits (=不合群的「怪」人). The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes (=與所處環境格格不入的異類). The ones who see things differently. They』re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo (=現狀). You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify (=貶低) them. About the only thing you can』t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. - Apple Inc.」    網上可以找到這個廣告的視頻。

請問是轉帖還是原創？