◎ 蘇正隆

讀過《哈利．波特》對4 Privet Drive大概都不陌生，那是主角哈利童年住處，the street address of the home owned by Vernon and Petunia Dursley，他阿姨佩妮和姨丈威農德．思禮的家。Privet（Ligustrum vulgare）「歐洲女貞」是英國常見的綠籬植物，4 Privet Drive台灣版譯成「水蠟樹街四號」，中國簡體版譯為「女貞路四號」，以譯成「女貞」為宜。

日前經過台大附近新生南路三段，看到行道上的「日本女貞」（Ligustrum liukiuense, Japanese Privet）長得好好的，卻給鏟除，又重種另一批「日本女貞」。奇怪吧？不！因為選舉到了。

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許多掌握政府資源者往往會利用選舉前大方撥款，給自己的地方樁腳一些好處，讓他們包些工程。這種政客籠絡支持者的政治手腕，中文叫「分贓政治」，英文叫pork barrel，直譯就是「豬肉桶」。底下是Merriam-Webster對pork barrel的解釋：government projects or appropriations yielding rich patronage benefits … used figuratively to mean "a supply of money" or "one’s livelihood" （a farmer, after all, could readily turn pork into cash）. When 20th-century legislators doled out appropriations that benefited their home districts, someone apparently made an association between the profit a farmer got from a barrel of pork and the benefits derived from certain state and federal projects. By 1909, pork barrel was being used as a noun naming such government appropriations, and today the term is usually used attributively in constructions such as "pork barrel spending" or "a pork barrel project."

「日本女貞」又名「琉球女貞」，其實是台灣原生植物。

（作者為大學講師、出版社發行人 ）

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