In the run-up to today’s mid-term election, observers of American politics have lamented that the nation’s political landscape is more divided than ever. A Pew Research Center report released this year concluded that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines—and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive—than at any point in the last two decades.” As anyone who has ever looked through comments on a political blog can attest, this polarization often translates into venomous language, with Republicans and Democrats slinging insults at each other over the partisan divide.

在今天的中期選舉拉開序幕前，美國政治觀察家紛紛哀嘆于國家政治格局的空前分裂。皮尤研究中心今年發布的一項調查認為“共和黨和民主黨在意識形態方面的分歧越發明顯，黨派間的相互反感愈演愈烈，為二十年來之最?！睙o論是誰，只要看了政治博客上的評論，都會知道這種兩極分化必會引發一場罵戰，會使共和黨和民主黨在黨派分歧上互相詆毀。

American English has a specialized vocabulary of insults based on party affiliation. For instance, a Democrat deriding a Republican might use the term wingnut, combining the notion of right-wing extremism and irrational nuttiness, or Rethuglican (Rethug for short), a blend of Republican and thug. The lexicon of Republican insults for Democrats includes moonbat, which the late William Safire traced back to libertarian blogger Perry de Havilland in the fuller form “barking moonbat”, suggesting ideology-crazed partisans howling at the moon. Even more common than moonbat in Oxford’s tracking corpus is the schoolyard-esque slur libtard (from liberal and –tard in retard, an offensive term for a person with intellectual disabilities). Liberal neologists have gotten in on the -tard act too, but Teatard (with reference to the conservative Tea Party movement), conservatard, and Republitard have thus far failed to achieve widespread currency.

美式英語中基于黨派關系有一個名為“詆毀“的專業術語。例如，一個民主黨可能用“Wingnut瘋子”一詞嘲弄共和黨人，這個詞匯兼具右翼極端主義與缺乏理性的概念。或使用“Rethuglican”(簡稱為Rethug)，融合了暴徒和民主黨之意。共和黨詆毀民主黨人的詞匯包括“moonbat”，可以從已故的威廉?薩菲爾追溯到完整寫出 “barking moonbat”的自由博主佩里德哈維蘭，詞意為一群心存幻想的瘋子。在不斷更新的牛津英語語料庫中，校園式毀謗詞匯“libtard” (由詞匯“自由”liberal和“傻子”retard中的’tard’組成，是一種對于智障人士的蔑稱)的使用甚至比 “moonbat” 更為常見。自由的新語創造者也創造了帶有“tard”的詞匯，但 “teatard” (參照保守主義的茶黨運動)， “conservatard”,和 “republitard”卻至今仍未能實現廣泛使用。

Of course, Americans don’t always/ insult their political opponents using party-specific terminology. More often, they choose from English’s vast wealth of nonpartisan putdowns. Wondering whether there were patterns in how often common negative words were applied to people of various political stripes, I analyzed the American sources collected since 2012 by Oxford’s New Monitor Corpus (which aggregates more than 100 million words of English usage each month from online publications) to find the negative nouns most frequently modified by liberal, left-wing, and Democrat(ic), on the one hand, and conservative, right-wing, and Republican on the other. This is a crude approximation, since the pattern “[partisan adjective] [noun]” represents a small proportion of all partisan insults. Nonetheless, the results were intriguing. Out of a sample of about 1200 negative phrases gathered, these were the top 10 negative terms applied to liberals and conservatives by overall frequency:

當然,美國人并不總是用特定的政黨術語詆毀其政治對手。更多時候，他們會從龐大豐富的非黨派英語詞匯中選擇貶損的語言。那些用于攻擊各派系的常用負面詞多久出現一次?它們出現是否有固定的模式?為了了解這些，我對于2012年以來牛津新監測到的語料庫(它匯集每月網上出版物多達100多萬字的英語用法)中所收集的美式英語詞匯進行分析，發現負面名詞一方面常被用于修飾“liberal自由主義”，“left-wing左翼”及“Democratic民主黨”，另一方面，它也被用作“保守主義conservative”，“右翼right-wing”及“共和Democratic”的修飾詞。這只是個大概的猜測，因為這個模式 “【partisan黨派 形容詞】【名詞】“僅代表小部分的黨派詆毀詞匯。然而結果相當有趣。在收集的1200個負面詞匯樣本中，從總體使用頻率上看，以下是用于自由主義和保守主義的10大負面詞匯。(如下圖)

The overall number of insults in the sample was split fairly evenly between liberals and conservatives, but the insults lobbed at liberals were more varied; the top insult for conservatives, extremist, was used three times as often than the top insult for a liberal, hack. In a time of much-lamented partisanship, it is perhaps unsurprising that words associated with ideological extremism (extremist, ideologue, radical, zealot) were among the most common terms of criticism. Similarly, the lack of civility in our political discourse shines through in the frequency of taunts suggesting stupidity and irrationality. Such terms were brandished on both sides, but liberals were more likely to be called morons, fools, and loons, whereas conservatives were most often derided as nutjobs, nuts, and lunatics. Idiot was a favorite on both sides of the aisle.

我們可以看出樣本中，自由主義與保守主義的詆毀詞匯數量幾乎相當，但用于攻擊自由主義的詆毀詞匯更為多樣;在對保守主義的詆毀詞匯中，出現頻率最高的是 “extremist極端分子”，比用于自由主義的詆毀詞匯“hack駭客”的使用頻率高出三倍。在這個哀嘆黨派紛爭的時期，即使那些關于極端主義意識形態的詞匯(如“extremist極端分子”,“ideologue空想家”，“radical激進分子”，“zealot狂熱分子”)成為最常用的批判術語也不足為奇。同樣，因缺乏文明而大肆嘲諷的政治話語顯得有些愚蠢與非理性。雙方使用這些詞語相互攻擊，自由主義容易被保守主義叫做“morons白癡”，“fools傻子”，以及”loons廢物”，保守主義則常被自由主義嘲諷為“nutjobs蠢貨”，“nuts瘋子”和“lunatics精神病”。而“Idiot笨蛋”是雙方都喜歡用的詆毀詞匯。