导语：万花筒网罗各种题材短文，带你领略文章精妙用词！今天的主题是——历史教授指责年轻人说话都喜欢加一句“我觉得”是新时代年轻人说话太随意？还是上一代人没事找事？

原文：

"The way kids speak today, I'm here to tell you." Over the course of history, every aging generation has made that complaint, and it has always turned out to be 1.（言过其实，夸张的）. That's just as well. If the language really had been 2.（恶化，退化）all this time, we'd all be grunting like bears by now.

But when it comes to language, history is bunk. Or anyway, it hasn't deterred critics from monitoring the speech of today's young people for the signs of cultural decline.

In fact it was a professor of history named Molly Worthen who raised an alarm in The New York Times recently about the way millennials start their sentences with "I feel like," as in, "I feel like the media should concentrate more on the issues."

That expression may sound merely diffident, Worthen says, but its real purpose is to avoid confrontation by turning every statement into a feeling that halts an argument in its tracks — how can you say that my experience isn't valid? In the end, she says, "I feel like" makes logical discussion impossible and 3.（暗中破坏）the conduct of public life.

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You have to be doggedly 1.（迟钝的）to hear those uses of "feel" as mere effusions of feeling, much less to take them as evidence that millennials have all bailed on the sturdy rationalism of the Gen-Xers and Boomers and given themselves over to rampant subjectivity. Young people are perfectly capable of 2.（清晰地表达）logical opinions, whether about baseball or the political process —they just introduce them differently.

But then these lamentations are always obtuse. The complaints about "I feel like" are no more off-the-wall than the complaints people make about texting abbreviations, vocal fry and the other features that make the language of the young sound weird to older ears. Critics always want to make the next generation seem more alien than it actually is, like anthropologists reporting back from a field trip to Youngster Island.

Linguistically speaking, the hippies were right about people over 30. That's when our ear for language begins to fail us. It gets harder to learn new languages or memorize poetry; we forget more old words than we learn new ones. And we're apt to misunderstand what young people are trying to say. We register the words and tones but we can't imagine our way into their meanings. All we can do is project, 3.（润色）their words with our associations.

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译文参考：

 “我得说说现在年轻人的说话方式。”在历史的进程中，上一代人都会有这样的抱怨，不过每次都言过其实。这也没什么不好。如果语言一直都是一代不如一代，我们现在就该像动物一样只能嗷嗷叫了。

一说到语言，历史就是个骗小孩的玩意。但也阻止不了评论家监督年轻人的说话方式，找出文化衰退的迹象。

实际上，正是一位叫莫利·沃森的历史教授最近在《纽约时报》撰文敲响了警钟，她表示最近的年轻人说话总在开头加一句“我觉得”，比如“我觉得媒体应该更加关注这些问题。”

这个短语可能只是有点奇怪，沃森说，但真正的目的是把每个观点转化成停止争论的感觉，从而避免冲突——你总不能说我的感觉不成立吧？最终，她说“我觉得”不能构成理性的讨论，而且逐渐破坏了公共生活。

你得强压着自己不能太灵敏，一听到“觉得”就认为是抒发感情，更不用说以这个为依据，证明新时代年轻人彻底放弃了“X一代”或“婴儿潮”时代人们的理性主义，转而一股脑地投身到主观思想。不管是讨论棒球还是政治议程，年轻人完全可以清楚地表达自己的逻辑观点，他们只是换了一种表达方式而已。

但这些唱衰的观点语义不明。对“我觉得”的怨念与以往不同，以前年轻人的各种缩略语、气泡音还有其他表达方式稀奇古怪，让长辈的耳朵反应不过来。评论家总要夸大新时代年轻人的代沟，像是人类学家回来报告“少年孤岛”之行。

从语言学角度来看，嬉皮士对30多岁的人的看法是对的，我们的耳朵对语言的敏感性让我们失望了。年龄一到，更难学习新语言或背诵诗歌，学新东西的速度赶不上忘记旧东西的速度。而且我们更倾向于误解年轻人要表达的意思。我们抓住了字词和音调，却猜不出它们的意思。我们所做的就是投射，把自己的联想润色到他们的字词上。

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