Vocabulary

涉禽，特指有长腿、通常在浅水中行走觅食的水鸟通称（如鹤、鹭、火烈鸟）

"Flamingo mascots, flamingo souvenirs, and Pink Flamingo cocktails, a specialty of the eponymous hotel, have all utilized the long-legged, long-necked pink waders with wacky bills."

亡魂，归来者；特指死后又返回人间的鬼魂或幽灵（常用于文学和哥特式语境）

"She likens them to revenants, ghosts, returnees from the dead."

火烈鸟的群体名词，同时也双关地利用了 'flamboyance' 的词义（火红、艳丽、张扬）

"Since then, flamboyances of flamingos—the collective noun for the birds—have competed with oranges to symbolize the state."

人类世，用来指代一个人类活动对地球生态系统产生全球性影响的地质年代

"And, notes Fredriksen, in the big picture disasters of the Anthropocene, even glimmers are important."

在一个特定区域内被彻底消灭、根除（通常指物种或群体被蓄意杀戮殆尽）

"The only flamingo native to North America was exterminated in Florida by the early part of the twentieth century."

形容迈阿密海滩的Art Deco建筑风格达到了极致的、狂欢般的流行状态

"It may have started in the 1920s with the opening of the Flamingo Hotel in the Art Deco-a-go-go of Miami Beach."

使（某个特定地理区域的物种或群体）完全消亡，连根拔除

"Though extirpated as animals, flamingos nonetheless became icons of the state."

庄严；伟大；高贵（指人性中崇高、值得敬畏的方面）

"We’re living in a “change of era,” Leo declared in the more than 42,000-word document, warning of “technological divinization” and urging us to “safeguard the grandeur of humanity.”"

启示录式的；预示世界末日的（形容一种灾难性的、终结性的场景）

"Concern with end times — either apocalyptic doom or utopian singularity."

神化；奉若神明（将非神事物当作神来崇拜的过程）

"We’re living in a “change of era,” Leo declared in the more than 42,000-word document, warning of “technological divinization” and urging us to “safeguard the grandeur of humanity.”"

绝境；危机边缘（比喻极度危险的境地）

"As the pope has made clear, we are at a precipice."

绝对的；断然的；直言不讳的（不容置疑或反对）

"The answer is a categorical no."

内在性；内心世界（一个人内在的意识、情感、思想和自我反思的能力）

"The result is an AI that mimics the structure of human interiority in its output without having any interiority at all."

超越性；超凡（指超越人类经验和理解的范畴，常指向神性或精神境界）

"Does that mean that AI is God? Or the answer to the fundamental human longing for transcendence?"

弥漫的；普遍的（无所不在，渗透到各处）

"Wired calls this “an ethos of techno-theology that’s become pervasive in Silicon Valley.”"

充满；弥漫（尤指被液体、光或情感从内部充满）

"Since our new AI era began, even the language we use for the technology has been suffused with religious overtones."

弦外之音；含蓄的暗示（在主要含义之外的附加意味或联想）

"Since our new AI era began, even the language we use for the technology has been suffused with religious overtones."

君主内帑（供君主个人及内廷开销的私有资金）

"...Maria Hayward’s meticulous and beautiful edition of Catherine’s privy purse accounts is testament to the potential of lists of everyday stuff..."

（王室或宗教机构的）救济品分发官，施赒吏

"...as well as prominent ministers such as the Duke of Buckingham. While account books, as Hayward notes, are not always able to tell us exactly what value or meaning objects or goods had for the owner, they give clues to Catherine’s individual style and habits: her preferred milliner, for example, was Mary Cherrett, in Covent Garden; there are multiple payments for muffs, ribbons and lace to trim her clothes; she displays a fondness for plants and animals. The way she practised her faith is shown through payments made to servants who helped her mark religious days: a gift of a leek from a footman on St David’s Day; a cross on St Patrick’s Day. Others brought fish to be eaten on fish days. The accounts, written in a neat italic hand, were compiled by Barbara Howard, Countess of Suffolk, who was keeper of Catherine’s privy purse as well as first lady of the bedchamber and groom of the stool. Suffolk was also the Countess of Castlemaine’s aunt, and she and her husband, James Howard, were, in Hayward’s description, a ‘Restoration political and social “power couple”’. It was Suffolk who helped Catherine adapt to English court life, and prepared and dressed her body. The queen’s body, as the potential bearer of a Protestant child, was scrutinised. The Italian diplomat and writer Lorenzo Magalotti noted ‘the extraordinary frequency and abundance of her menses’. In June 1663, Pepys wrote in his diary that ‘the Queen hath much changed her humour, and is become very pleasant and sociable as any; and they say is with child.’ Catherine’s summer trips to Tunbridge Wells and Bath, where it was hoped the therapeutic waters would help her to conceive, were gossiped about, as were rumoured miscarriages. One report claimed she had miscarried after Charles’s pet fox had jumped on her bed. In not producing an heir, Catherine was perceived to have failed in a queen consort’s primary duty. As it became clear that she was unable to conceive – Shorland plausibly suggests endometriosis – Charles came under pressure to divorce Catherine and marry again. An anti-Catholic Whig faction, led by Antony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, agitated to divert the succession away from James, duke of York. James had begun to worship openly as a Catholic and his marriage to Mary of Modena in 1673 meant that he might have a Catholic son, who would push aside Mary, James’s safely Protestant daughter with his first wife. Popular verse began to laugh at Catherine. ‘The Lord Chancellor’s [Shaftesbury’s] Speech to the Parliament’ asked: ‘Would you once bless the English nation,/By changing of Queen Kate’s vocation,/And find one fit for procreation?’ To which Parliament answered: ‘I should be glad to see Kate going.’ Anti-Catholic hatred was never far below the surface in post-Reformation England. Between 1678 and 1681, the country succumbed to a wave of hysteria in response to the ‘Popish Plot’. It was alleged that Catholics were conspiring to kill Charles II and assume power, and that the pope was behind it. But the plots were only stories, fabricated by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. Oates was an Anglican preacher who had converted to Catholicism and then turned against Catholics. His testimonies were flimsy, inconsistent and clearly unreliable, but it did not take much to stoke anti-Catholic paranoia. Oates was dangerous because he was believed – men were imprisoned and executed on the basis of his ‘evidence’ – and because he could be used by Shaftesbury and his faction to advance their agenda for the succession. In 1679, Shaftesbury introduced the first of three exclusion bills that sought to prevent James from inheriting the throne unless he renounced his Catholicism. Charles’s illegitimate son, James, duke of Monmouth was proposed as a possible heir. Charles dissolved Parliament before any of the bills could pass, and sent James abroad for a while – an act Catherine believed to be ‘so contrary to the affection he bears towards this brother to whom he owes so much’. Catherine and some of her household found themselves implicated. Oates named her Catholic doctor, George Wakeman, as a would-be assassin; he was imprisoned in the Tower and tried for treason (he was found not guilty). Meanwhile a man called William Bedloe, an associate of Oates, had claimed that a high-profile Protestant magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, whose body had been found at Primrose Hill in strange circumstances, had been murdered in Somerset House. Oates circulated rumours that Catherine herself was planning to poison Charles. Charles questioned Oates personally but was not convinced. He could not believe Catherine ‘capable of a wicked thing’. While the Commons pressed for Catherine’s banishment, the House of Lords expressed belief in her goodness. Catherine, for her part, put her faith in God: ‘My trust is that the Almighty will establish the truth,’ she said. She did not take up her brother Pedro’s suggestion that she return to Portugal to wait for the hysteria to die down. And Charles did not bow to the pressure to divorce her, or abandon her, declaring that to do so would be ‘horrid’. Charles’s loyalty to Catherine, when he was anything but faithful, may be surprising. There was precedent, after all, for an English king to divorce in pursuit of an heir. He may have been motivated by genuine attachment, as well as principle. His attitude may also have been bound up with the loyalty he maintained to James, as his brother and as the legitimate heir. Charles’s entire kingship depended on the continued principle of hereditary right. Perhaps his own religious beliefs played a part. When he died in 1685, he died a Catholic. His last rites were read to him by Father Huddleston, the priest who had sheltered him from Cromwell’s soldiers after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Catherine mourned in the traditional way, and for a long time. She was appropriately consoled by poets who praised her, as Joshua Barnes did, as ‘the sole good queen’ and ‘the best that ere/did th’honourable chains of wedlock wear’. After Charles II’s death, Catherine lived in Somerset House and presided over her own household and privy council. She still had her own money, as part of her jointure. Once king, James II pushed for the toleration of Catholicism throughout England, Scotland and Ireland – much to the horror of many in Parliament and the Church. This brief climate of religious toleration gave Catherine new opportunities to support and patronise Catholics, as shown by Gregory in her chapter in Later Stuart Queens. But it was short-lived. On 10 June 1688, Mary of Modena had a longed-for child, a boy, named James. To block this Catholic succession, the Whig faction in Parliament began to negotiate with James II’s first daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, stadtholder of the Dutch republic. In the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, William and Mary were crowned, and James, Mary and their son – who would become the Pretender – were sent into exile. Catherine was allowed to remain at Somerset House but she was now alone as a Catholic royal. Her relationship with William and Mary was cordial, but strained. She did not attend their coronation and William withheld money due to her. Unsurprisingly, as Gregory shows, Catherine’s home became a meeting place for Jacobites, those who remained loyal to the deposed James II and his son. Most were Catholic, but not all; the principle of hereditary succession was held dear. Catherine, however, wanted to return to Portugal. As she wrote to her brother Pedro, who was now king, her duty to Charles as his wife, which was also her duty to God, was done. Catherine left England in 1692, taking with her 103 loyal members of her household, including English ladies-in-waiting, her English clothes and some English customs. Back in Portugal, she did not retreat from public life but rather built her own baroque palace, Paço da Bemposta, in Lisbon. She twice acted as regent for Pedro II: in 1704, when he was on military campaign against Spain, and again in 1705, after he had suffered a stroke. As regent in a country where female rule was legitimate but often resisted, Catherine successfully oversaw military victories against Spain that preserved the crown. She maintained a British identity until her death, styling herself ‘Queen of Great Britain, Infanta of Portugal’. As Goldthorpe shows in her essay in Later Stuart Queens, Catherine played a part in reviving the Anglo-Portuguese alliance once Queen Anne was on the throne. While the poet Edmund Waller associated this ‘best of queens’ with the ‘best of herbs’ – tea – Goldthorpe credits Catherine with some influence over the British love of port. A treaty in 1705 reduced the import duty payable on Portuguese wines in exchange for freer trade in English woollens and cloths. As a result, port and madeira dominated the wine trade for ‘over a century’. On 31 December 1705, Catherine died, still as regent. The Braganza family continued to rule Portugal until 1910. On Charles II’s death, Aphra Behn dedicated a consolatory poem to Catherine, addressing her as ‘the great pattern of piety and virtue’. Despite not securing the succession, despite being Catholic, Catherine managed to be perceived as an ideal consort. Royal wives were – and are – loved or loathed according to values that remain spectacularly unchanged: pretty (not too sexy), devout, dutiful. This May, Catherine, princess of Wales, returned from a trip to Italy during which she had pursued her interest in early years education. It was a solo trip, to confirm Catherine’s renewed health but also to emphasise her own, appropriate sphere of influence. A press opportunity allowed Prince William to praise Catherine, which he did in entirely conventional terms: a great wife, a great mother, thoroughly devoted to her causes. Meanwhile, the photographers captured Catherine’s radiant smile, Botticelli curls, sharp suit in Marian blue. An image that balances the expected, successful virtues of a consort is carefully curated. It has a long history."

官方首席情妇（特指法国宫廷中被公开承认且拥有一定地位的国王情妇）

"...from the early 1670s, were associated with Louise de Kérouaille (later duchess of Portsmouth), Catherine’s French maid of honour and then Charles’s maîtresse en titre."

猛地被拉入，生硬地被拖入（某种境况）

"Portugal had been ruled by Spain since 1580, and yanked into the Habsburg empire..."

隐居的，与世隔绝的，受庇护的

"Catherine’s childhood, however, seems to have been cloistered."

党派纷争的，内讧的，由内部分歧引起的

"...it ensured her survival at Charles’s oversexed and factious court."

君主配偶（特指王后或王夫的称谓）

"History has, until recently, neglected British queens consort..."

改写，以不同的形式重新呈现（信息、故事等）

"...much of this work has yet to be recast for a general reader."

统治的，在位的（特指拥有主权的君主）

"Later Stuart Queens includes new research on several queens regnant and queens consort..."

（丈夫）对妻子不忠的，沉迷于风流韵事的

"How could she have put up with such a philandering husband?"

基底；基础介质。在生物学中指生物生长的底层；在这里指构成某物基础的物理材料或物质，尤其指用于计算或信息处理的物质。

"you could convert the entire galaxy into computer substrate, which the galaxy just becomes a giant data center in space for AI training or something."

玷污、败坏（名声、声誉等）。

"It wasn’t really intended, in my interpretation, to be a calculator, and I think that’s where it’s been abused and why it has been sullied, over the years, because there have been numerous papers where astronomers have just plugged in numbers for the frequency of intelligence."

标准化的、样板式的理由；指那些被反复使用、缺乏新意的解释或论点。

"I’ll give you my sort of four boilerplate reasons why I always say we should look for moons."

（拍照时的）抢镜，即在照片中意外出现的人或物，破坏了原本的构图。

"It’s photobombing right along, right? You can’t distinguish it. You can’t separate it. They’re just one smudge of light."

泛种论，即生命以某种形式（如微生物）在宇宙中传播，从而在不同星球上起源的理论。

"But Crick wrote a book called Life Itself, and he was interested in the idea that life on this planet might have been seeded by a process that people were calling directed panspermia, that maybe life had been sent here."

有先见之明的；预知未来的。

"He was looking at trends in technology and doing a big extrapolation. But I think today it seems quite prescient. It seems possible."

混淆变量；混杂因素。在科学实验中，指一种与自变量和因变量都相关的变量，它的存在会导致对因果关系的错误推断。

"But the confounder rate—how often natural geochemistry or whatever it is producing ozone or whatever signature you’re looking for—that has to be the same."

天文数字般不可能；概率极其微小，小到几乎可以忽略不计。

"And if the number is sufficiently small, like astronomically improbable, it could be that we’re the only life in the universe."

人择原理论证。这是一种哲学论证，认为我们观察到的宇宙参数之所以如此，是因为如果它们不是这样，作为观察者的我们（人类）就不会存在来观察它们。

"But you can make an anthropic argument that it’s perfectly consistent that the solar system could be the only place that has planets, and it would be perfectly natural that we would happen to be born in the one place where there are planets, ‘cause of course, we couldn’t be born anywhere else."

让我们大吃一惊；令我们震惊。

"But I think what’s really took us aback is just the diversity of worlds."

（比喻义）严厉地、刨根问底地审视或质问

"readers should check out Charlie Kaufmann’s 2020 Netflix film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which imaginatively cross-examines the sadness and misery at the heart of Golden Age musicals."

（某事物的）主流趋势、一般趋向、要旨

"whose postmodern cynicism and fractured narratives better match the tenor of the times."

无意中暴露出（某事物的本质特征或缺陷）

"I was curious what to make of musicals that, in being made for film first, betrayed the key quality of a live musical."

潜在的、潜伏的（但尚未显现）

"What I found is that the screen helps capture and draw attention to the grief latent in musicals of all kinds."

（学术写作中）引用文献的策略和惯例

"This was my strategy throughout the book and informs my citational practices as well."

认为……理所当然（从而不加珍视或质疑）

"Golden Age musicals take for granted a number of assumptions about midcentury America—that Americans believe in God, that American children grow up with married parents, that Americans believe in America—that by the end of the 1960s were being challenged on many sides."

看似无害、不引起怀疑的表面

"the “American musical is an unsuspecting, squeaky-clean surface” that “cleverly holds back grief … a skin, a covering, a hide for deeper, darker, bigger feelings.”"

逃避现实的、提供逃避方式的（艺术形式）

"their traces can be found in even that most escapist of artforms."

（特定时代的）时代精神、思潮

"grief and the complex, contradictory emotions through which it manifests really were an integral if repressed part of the cultural zeitgeist."