“As we are . . . prisoners of the words we pick, we had better pick them well,” said Giovanni Sartori, the Italian political scientist. For a long time since they were first coined in the 1980s, the words “emerging markets” appeared to have been well-chosen, such was their popularity as a description for a big chunk of the planet. As the world evolves, the term is progressively losing its purchase over the collective consciousness because it imprisons perceptions within parameters that are increasingly false or unhelpful.
「由於我們……是自己所挑選的詞語的囚徒,因此我們得好好遣詞,」義大利政治學家喬萬尼•薩託利(Giovanni Sartori)如此說道。「新興市場」這個表述自上世紀80年代出爐以來,在很長一段時間內似乎很貼切,人們很喜歡用它來描述地球上相當大一部分地區。隨著世界發展變化,這個詞逐漸失去了其對世人集體意識的影響力,因爲它把人們的觀感桎梏在日益虛假或無益的參數中。