英语小常识：Silly, Foolish 和 Stupid

英语中对于“不聪明”的描述，常用的有三个字：silly, foolish 和 stupid。这三个字的含义相当接近，许多人往往弄不清楚，闹出笑话来。

虽然从语义上看，这3个词都有“蠢”的含义，但语气上，stupid 最强，foolish 次之，silly最弱。

Stupid一般指某人缺乏正常的理解力，智力上有天生的缺陷，所以这是一个贬义词，几乎是骂人的粗口了。

Foolish通常形容由于缺乏常识，判断能力有限而做出不恰当的决定。如：

It is foolish of her to spend so much money on her shoes.

而silly则是一个无伤大雅，甚至显得童稚可爱的词汇，比如小孩子常和父母说：Daddy (or Mommy), you are silly. 反过来，父母也可以这么说孩子，但没有一个父母会认为自己的孩子foolish 或stupid。

语言的准确翻译是很苦难的，如果硬要翻译，我想大概可以这么归纳：

Silly——小笨蛋

Foolish——傻瓜

Stupid——蠢驴

可以参考这个句子：Don’t ask so many silly questions. She is a bit foolish but not stupid.

至于那句名言“Stay foolish” 如何翻译，就只能见仁见智了。我想，还是准确理解最重要。我自己的体会是，别太认真了，傻一点，呆一点，木一点,快乐一点才能生活的好一点。太较真了在这个世界上活得会很累。 

比如我们上网，如果每一个帖子都要打开看，每一个跟贴都要回，别人的批评谩骂每一句都要来来回回对峙，岂不浪费生命自己和自己过不去吗？这才真的是stupid!

随心所欲，大智若愚——Stay foolish.

Make yourself silly, but not stupid!

 

[乐维]

谢谢分享！

Stay foolish 可以翻成“难道糊涂”

[纵然平行]

I think that your clarifying explanations of three English words, in terms their linguistic relativity, make good sense.

However, I’d like to bring up some of other possible angles within the legit interpretations of these three words as food for your thought.

Under some circumstances, the word “stupid” may not contain any derogatory connotation at all. For instance, in the acronym, KISS, - Keep it simple, stupid! “Stupid” actually means the opposite of being stupid, it actually gives implication to be smart or prudent instead.

As per your interpretation of Job’s famous phrase “ Stay foolish”, I personally believe that what he might mean is that people should think out of box which often confines us with our social and engineering norms. Further, unlike what you’d conceive as to play “dumb” or stay in low-key for the word foolish, Jobs might hint us to be courageous in challenging the establishments and conventional wisdom, to which, any deviation from normal conventions and traditions would be considered as unorthodox and foolish. Allow me to give you an example to illustrate my point, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) an accomplished astronomer and physicist was trying to persuade the Roman Catholic Church to accept heliocentric theory. Obvious, he was label by people some of them were powerful then as a foolish fool. Well, since you’ve already know the end of the story, so I’d leave it here. :)

In short, the meaning(s) of a English word may not be always as tantamount as we would perceive per its face values. In fact, an English word may often changes or redefines its original definitions to convey the new apprehensions when time, context, speaker, tone, subculture and other factors come to play.

As you may know already, English is an interesting revolving language though it long history. So, learning and using it as an effective tool to express ourselves precisely and persuasively is definite challenging time to time, but it can be fun as well.

Thanks you for share your understanding with us, appreciated!

[晓青]

学习了。