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(letter, posing as noun) a frightful kind of online open-mic night, owned and dominated by Elon Musk
（字母，充當名詞）一個可怕的在線開放式麥克風之夜，由伊隆•馬斯克(Elon Musk)擁有和主導
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.
最讓人抓狂的是，它甚至都不是一個真正的單詞。然而，7月23日，它忽然就成了一個單詞——伊隆•馬斯克突然宣佈，他去年購買的社群媒體平臺改名爲X。一個由一位粉絲設計的全新黑白標誌忽然出現在我們的書籤欄和集體意識中。
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，《牛津英語詞典》打破慣例，將「tweet」一詞新增到其神聖的頁面中，儘管這個詞的使用還不到10年。然而，十年後，一個新詞就變成了歷史。
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.
正如我們所知，Twitter已經正式死亡。隨之消失的不僅是我們熟悉的小鳥標誌，還有一大堆Twitter辭彙：tweet變成了更通用的「post」。retweet和quote-tweet也消失了。分析人士表示，馬斯克一夜之間讓這個品牌價值蒸發200億美元。
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.
這個社群媒體平臺並不是馬斯克的「孩子」中第一個使用這個字母的。他曾將其用作各種商業企業的名稱——其中最著名的是 X.com，這是他在1999年聯合創辦的一家網上銀行，後來與另一家公司合併成爲貝寶(PayPal)，他還將這個字母作爲他與前女友格萊姆斯(Grimes)的第一個孩子的名字。
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.
我們可能會認爲，這個字母的同音詞——ex（前任）——很貼切地描述了該平臺曾經的大型廣告商。在馬斯克上個月支援了一篇反猶貼文後，蘋果(Apple)、迪士尼(Disney)和IBM等企業巨擘都拋棄了該平臺。馬斯克後來道歉，並表示自己被誤解了，不過他也告訴這些曾經的廣告商，「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.
於是，這個平臺繼續運轉。在馬斯克的掌舵下，不知道一年後它會是什麼樣子。《牛津英語詞典》也許應該暫時不要把這個只有一個字母的單詞新增到它的頁面中。