这篇《经济学人》讣告赏析来自“现象级英语”社群成长群会员，首发于公众号【英语学习笔记】，欢迎关注。
也欢迎大家多多指正。
标题赏析：
Doing one's darnedest，意思是“尽某人最大的努力”，在这里可以理解为“鞠躬尽瘁”。darnedest 是粗话 damnedest 的委婉语，这个词也表现出了老布什敢想敢作的形象，牛x闪闪，开挂一样的人生。
《经济学人》会常在小标题中用插入语来介绍一个人的身份，这里用的是 the last of his kind, 意思是“像他这样的总统，他是最后一个了”。通过查背景资料了解到，像老布什这样经历过二战以及他们那个年代的政治家，他是最后一位了；另一个角度来看，这也是一个很高的评价，说明他那样的作风已经风华绝代，绝无仅有。究竟他是什么风格的呢？这里也卖了个关子，吸引读者赶快去读讣告正文。
Paragraph 1:
①Wherever he went, as America’s president or before it, George Herbert Walker Bush usually carried a felt-tipped pen and a supply of notecards. ②On these he wrote letters. ③Some were thank-yous; others a clumsy, but courteous, attempt to get his views across to other people; yet others just a “good to see you” kind of thing. ④When the time came to write his presidential memoirs, to salve some of that desperate hurt after Bill Clinton thrashed him in 1992, he published instead 600-plus pages of correspondence. ⑤They ranged from doting letters to newborn grandchildren to his worries, as a young seaman in 1943, that his girlfriend Barbara, “so darn attractive”, would drop him while he was away; from his attempt to explain the Watergate scandal to his four young sons, to his mortified account of throwing up in 1992 on the Japanese prime minister, “the damnedest experience”. ⑥He admitted that some of the letters were nutty. ⑦But they were also of the moment. ⑧As he said, “It’s all about heartbeat.”
段落解析：
文章的开头用一个细节描写展开：老布什不管去到哪里，无论是以美国总统的身份还是在那之前，他总是带着一支毛毡笔和一叠便签纸。为什么呢？因为他喜欢写信，写各种各样的信。
词句精读：
salve，“药膏”，这里用作动词是引申义“；抚平（创伤、伤害等）”。文中是说老布什通过出版书信集来慰藉他大败于克林顿的伤心史。我们想表达，做善事使我们的良心得到安慰，就可以说：Charity salves our conscience.
thrash，这个词作为“击败”是有“轻易击败，大败，重创”的意思，比 defeat 显得更轻而易举，放在这里更准确，表现出克林顿不费吹灰之力且以大比分领先击败了老布什的总统连任。
mortified，形容词，意是是“羞愧的；难堪的”。
nutty，形容词，意思是“傻里傻气，疯疯癫癫的”，就是“crazy”的意思。我们也常用到的是“go nuts”或“somebody is nuts”，来表示 “crazy”。
这里作者是引用了他的书信集中序言里的说法，原文节选“...Letters written when my heart was heavy or full of joy. Serious letters. Nutty letters. Caring and rejoicing letters.” 一个 nutty 表现出了老布什的自嘲幽默，就像小布什悼词里对他父亲的评价一样：“He loved to laugh, especially at himself. He could tease and needle, but never out of malice.”（父亲爱笑，尤其喜欢自嘲。他喜欢调侃，但绝无恶意。）
“It’s all about heartbeat.”
这就话被加了引号，说明是引自某部作品，经查询其实是来自老布什的书信集 All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings。书中的序言部分出现了三次“heartbeat”，其中有一处就是“It's all about heartbeat”。
Paragraph 2:
①In one letter he happened to mention a childhood rebuke from his mother: “Now, George, don’t walk ahead.” ②He took her words to heart, staying, for most of his political career, loyally behind and modestly to one side. ③As chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1974, he stuck by Richard Nixon until it became more urgent to save the party; at which point, he publicly asked him to resign. ④He felt afterwards as though someone had died. ⑤In his eight years as Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, though they had sparred bitterly in the 1980 primaries over Reagan’s “voodoo economics” and his callow Hollywood sparkle, he never criticised or upstaged him. ⑥During the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s, though present at many salient meetings, he declared himself out of the loop, and it was hard to prove otherwise.
段落解析：
这段主要讲老布什一直坚守“don't walk ahead”。
词句精读：
take something to heart，表示“十分介意某人的话或行为；耿耿于怀”。如果想安慰别人不要把什么事都放在心上，你可以这么说：You can’t take everything people say to heart。
He felt afterwards as though someone had died.
这里的难点其实是 feel 这个词，在这里的意思是“让人感到”，和 seem 的意思差不多。也就是说，“忠义两难全”那种痛苦，为了大义，他不得不忠，这让他很痛苦。
upstage，这个词很形象，它当副词的意思是“在舞台后部”，当动词时就是“将……置于幕后”，引申为“抢…的风头”。《经济学人》有篇讲很多法国人不知道法国总理的名字，有人这么风趣地解释道：“The main job for a French prime minister is not to upstage the president,” says one observer wryly.”
Paragraph 3:
The vision thing
①People often supposed him out of the loop in other ways, too: a boy born to privilege, called “Poppy” by his parents, a product of Phillips Academy and Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, who was (falsely) rumoured in the 1992 campaign never to have passed a quart of milk through a supermarket scanner. ②He was a Yankee aristocrat who could have followed his Daddy on to Wall Street but instead became a Texas oil man (the only Texan, growled Speaker Jim Wright, who ate lobster with his chilli), and went on to represent the toniest bit of Houston in Congress. ③All this, as well as the tennis-playing summers in Kennebunkport, seemed to set him firmly apart from the average Joe, though he let it be known as president that his favourite food was pork rinds, and banned from the White House the broccoli his mother had made him eat.
段落解析：
小标题 The vision thing 是个分界线，承上启下。在它之前，基本上跟他具体履历无关的东西，讲信讲他妈妈的话对他的影响；在它之后，文章要开始讲他非凡的一生，比如成长背景、政治生涯及兴趣爱好等等。
词句精读：
out of the loop，注意它属于非正式用语，我们用它来描述“不了解、不知道某圈子內的最新消息和状况”。in/out of the loop 和中文里的“圈内/圈外”一个意思，表示 kept / not kept informed。
a boy born to... a product of... 我们下次用来介绍他人生平时，就可以用到这样的表达，来替换 “his father/mother is...”。
let it/sth be known，这个短语表示“使人们知道或清楚；明确表示；公开表示”。还有个相类似的表达叫“make it/sth be known”。
《经济学人》在难民带来的挑战的文章里，提到德国官方的决定：German officials have let it be known that countries that resist such efforts will meet a skeptical eye when they next try to win subsidies from the EU budget. 比如我们想表达，他公开表示他要参加市长竞选。我们可以说：He let it be known [=he announced] that he intends to run for mayor.
背景补充：
小布什在致老布什的悼词中也拿“西兰花”说事幽了一默，“The man couldn't stomach vegetables, especially broccoli. And by the way, he passed these genetic defects along to us.”（他不爱吃蔬菜，尤其讨厌西兰花。 顺便说一句，他把这些缺陷也遗传给了我们。）
Paragraph 4:
①With the label “preppy” came the tag “wimp”, which infuriated him far more. ②He had had a brave war, enlisting at 18 and completing one mission with his aircraft on fire. ③Later he did not hesitate to send 27000 troops to dislodge Manuel Noriega from Panama, or to launch a ground war against Saddam Hussein in 1991-declearing victory and pulling out in 100 hours, which pushed his approval ratings to 89%. ④He was not above nasty attack ads in the 1988 campaign, excoriating Michael Dukakis for giving furlough to a black rapist. ⑤But Nixon, who hated Ivy Leaguers, seemed to think him soft; Reagan said he lacked spunk; and his talk of “Big Mo”and “kicking ass” on the campaign trail often ended in retreat. ⑥In1990 a dust-up with Congress forced him to capitulate on his steely election pledge of “No new taxes”. ⑦This, as well as the brief recession of 1990-91, cost him the 1992 election, though even as voters went to the polls the figures for growth were ticking upwards, ushering in almost a decade of prosperity.
段落解析：
从本段开始，具体来说老布什作为总统的从政风格，还有他的政绩，别人对他的评价，他的政治主张以及他连任惨败的原因。
词句精读：
①With the label “preppy” came the tag “wimp”, which infuriated him far more.
蜘蛛侠有句名言：With great power comes great responsibility。我们可以学习这个 with... comes 的地道句型。
⑥In1990 a dust-up with Congress forced him to capitulate on his steely election pledge of “No new taxes”.
注意这里用“a dust-up”做了主语。dust-up，表示“ 争吵，争斗”，a commotion，quarrel, or fight. 可以说have a dust-up with somebody表示与某人争吵。
Paragraph 5:
①What he lacked, as he more or less admitted, was “the vision thing”. ②Ideologically, he was flexible: moderate sometimes (indeed, in one Texas race, left of the Democrat), while at others he would traipse round pandering to conservatives, as George Will cruelly put it, with a thin tinny “arf”, like a lap-dog. ③On domestic policy, as president, he inclined to the hard right (prayer in schools, gun rights, anti-abortion), while also loosening immigration policy and expanding the rights of the disabled. ④Wearing his mild Episcopalian hat, he mentioned a thousand points of light, a kinder, gentler America, and a new breeze blowing away the leaves of an old tree. ⑤It was all as vague as it was all deeply hoped for.
段落解析：
这段仍承接上一段，讲老布什的从政风格和政治主张。
Paragraph 6
①His forte, and first love, was foreign policy. ②He had been ambassador to the UN for Nixon, an envoy to China for Gerald Ford (he and Barbara riding round delightedly on bicycles) and head of the CIA, besides, as vice-president, a follower-of-the-hearse at dozens of state funerals. ③Instinctively, he thought in terms of global power games;fortuitously, his time as president coincided with the end of the cold war, a heady and fascinating moment. ④With Mikhail Gorbachev he struck up an easy working friendship, and in 1991, in the wake of the Gulf war, he even had a moment of comprehensive vision: a new world order, based not on force but on the rule of law, which America would strongly lead.
段落解析：
本段主旨就是老布什在外交方面的出色表现及想法。
词句精读：
forte，意思是“长处，特长”，这个词完美替换了strength，advantage，类似的表达还有 strong suit。比如你想说自己的长处就是能吃不胖，就可以说：My forte is that I can eat a lot of without getting fat. 这真是每个小仙女都想要的长处了。
Paragraph 7
①Such grandiloquence, like eloquence, was rare in him. ②He was schooled in modesty, fond of the small behind-the-scenes gesture rather than the large public show. ③He belonged to a generation that had no patience for today’s blowhards who, putting self before nation, always push themselves forward. ④But when the times and events demanded he could, perhaps to his own surprise, find the right words and walk confidently ahead.
段落解析：
这段描写了老布什的优良品格。老布什是一个不善言辞的人，而且非常谦虚低调，比起台上更喜欢幕后工作。他属于对今天这种将自己置身于国家之上、总爱画大饼的吹牛大王没有耐心的一代人。虽然如此，当需要挺身而出时，他总是知道该说什么鼓舞人心，并挑起大梁。
词句精读：
behind-the-scenes / public show，两个一组，一个幕后，一个台前公映，非常相得益彰了。送给大家一句鸡汤：Don't compare your behind-the scenes to someone else's highlight reel。
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