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(letter, posing as noun) a frightful kind of online open-mic night, owned and dominated by Elon Musk
（字母，充当名词）一个可怕的在线开放式麦克风之夜，由埃隆•马斯克(Elon Musk)拥有和主导
One of the (many) maddening things about it is that it’s not even an actual word. And yet on July 23 it was thrust upon us as one, when Elon Musk suddenly announced that the social media platform he had bought the previous year was now called X. A new black-and-white logo, designed by a fan, popped up in our bookmark bars and collective consciousness.
最让人抓狂的是，它甚至都不是一个真正的单词。然而，7月23日，它忽然就成了一个单词——埃隆•马斯克突然宣布，他去年购买的社交媒体平台改名为X。一个由一位粉丝设计的全新黑白标志忽然出现在我们的书签栏和集体意识中。
In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary broke with protocol when it added “tweet” to its hallowed pages, despite that use of the word having been around for less than 10 years. Yet in the space of a decade, a neologism has become a paleologism.
2013年，《牛津英语词典》打破惯例，将“tweet”一词添加到其神圣的页面中，尽管这个词的使用还不到10年。然而，十年后，一个新词就变成了历史。
Twitter as we knew it is officially dead. And with it has gone not just the familiar bird logo, but also a whole lot of Twitter vocab: the tweet has become the much more generic “post”. Gone, too, are the retweet and quote-tweet. Analysts said Musk had wiped up to $20bn off the brand’s value overnight.
正如我们所知，Twitter已经正式死亡。随之消失的不仅是我们熟悉的小鸟标志，还有一大堆Twitter词汇：tweet变成了更通用的“post”。retweet和quote-tweet也消失了。分析人士表示，马斯克一夜之间让这个品牌价值蒸发200亿美元。
The social media platform is not the first of Musk’s babies to use the letter. He has used it as a name for various business ventures — most notably X.com, an online bank he co-founded in 1999 that later merged with another company to become PayPal — as well as for his first child with former girlfriend Grimes.
这个社交媒体平台并不是马斯克的“孩子”中第一个使用这个字母的。他曾将其用作各种商业企业的名称——其中最著名的是 X.com，这是他在1999年联合创办的一家网上银行，后来与另一家公司合并成为贝宝(PayPal)，他还将这个字母作为他与前女友格莱姆斯(Grimes)的第一个孩子的名字。
We might consider a homophone of the letter an apt description of what were once the platform’s biggest advertisers: ex. Corporate giants such as Apple, Disney and IBM all deserted it after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post last month. He later apologised and said he had been misinterpreted, though he also told the exes they could “go fuck” themselves.
我们可能会认为，这个字母的同音词——ex（前任）——很贴切地描述了该平台曾经的大型广告商。在马斯克上个月支持了一篇反犹帖子后，苹果(Apple)、迪士尼(Disney)和IBM等企业巨头都抛弃了该平台。马斯克后来道歉，并表示自己被误解了，不过他也告诉这些曾经的广告商，“去你的”。
So the platform flails on. With Musk at its helm, there’s no telling where it will be in a year’s time. The OED should probably hold off from adding the one-letter word to its pages for now.
于是，这个平台继续运转。在马斯克的掌舵下，不知道一年后它会是什么样子。《牛津英语词典》也许应该暂时不要把这个只有一个字母的单词添加到它的页面中。
