评论
打印
The rules of discussing class in Britain are, pleasingly, very like those of cricket. Once you know them, they seem incredibly obvious and intuitive and barely worth mentioning; if you don't know them, they are pointlessly, sadistically complicated, their exclusivity almost an exercise in snobbery in its own right.
在英国讨论阶级，令人愉快地就像板球的那些事。一旦你了解他们，他们似乎是令人难以置信的明显和直观，几乎不值一提；如果你不知道他们，他们毫无意义、残酷地复杂，他们的排他性在自己的权利范围内几乎是一个势利行径。
Nowhere is this more evident and yet more tacit than in relationships: people marry into their own class. It's called "assortative mating". You know this by looking around, yet there's such profound squeamishness about it that research tends to cluster around class proxies. The question goes: "Do you and your spouse share the same educational attainment?" (Translation: are you the same class?) Or: "Did you go to the same university?" (Translation: are you really, really the same class?)
没有哪比这更明显了，但在恋爱中更是心照不宣：人们选择门当户对的人结婚。这就是所谓的“同类配对”。你通过四处张望知道这些，但关于它如此严重地吃毛求疵以至于研究往往集中在阶级替代物周围。问题就到了：“你和你的配偶拥有相同的学历吗？”（言外之意：你们是同一阶层的吗？）或者说：“你们去了同一所大学吗？”（言外之意：你们真的、真的是同一阶层吗？）
This trend is immune to social progress elsewhere. If anything, people are more likely than ever to marry into their own class, as a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research showed this year. Of people born in 1958, just over a third of women had a partner from the same class as themselves: 38% married up, while 23% married down. For those born in 1970, 45% married into the same class; of those born between 1976 and 1981, 56% married into the same class, with a far smaller proportion (16%) marrying up.
这种趋势在社会进步的其他方面是免疫的。如果有什么的话，人们比以往任何时候都更愿意嫁进自己的阶层，从公共政策研究学院今年的一份报告显示。出生于1958年的人，刚刚超过三分之一的女性有一个来自他们自己阶层的伴侣：38％嫁入上层，而23％嫁入下层。对于那些1970年出生的人，45％嫁到同一个阶层，而在1976年和1981年之间出生的人有56%与同阶层的人结婚，更小比例（16％）的人嫁入上层。
Even the phrases "marrying up" and "marrying down" are sullying to use. You can't really escape the connotation that the rich are better than the poor. But I use them anyway, putting them in the grammatical equivalent of surgical gloves, because there is no right-on alternative: there's no unsnobbish way to convey a difference in class between two people. The leftwards path is to pretend class doesn't exist. Which is fine, but it's also total horse manure.
尽管短语“嫁入上层”和“嫁入下层”带侮辱地使用。你真的不能逃避富人比穷人更好的言外之意。但我无论如何使用他们，把他们置于外科手术手套的语法地位，因为没有正确的替代，还是没有不势力的方式来表达两个人之间的阶级差异。向左走是假装阶级不存在。这很好，但它也是完全的马屁。
