外刊阅读：英国的街道名满是脏话？(2)

[Paragraph 3] Street names are telling. Run your eye down a list of British streets and it quickly becomes clear that, among the Jesus Lanes and Queen’s Streets, the Trafalgar Squares and Empire Roads, lie not merely streets and alleys but ideals: a cartography of ideology and aspiration. So it is significant that Cambridge University has announced that next year it will name new streets after black alumni and abolitionists after its research found it had been “implicated in enslavement in a number of ways”.
[Paragraph 4] People rarely consider street signs, says Maoz Azaryahu, professor of cultural geography at the University of Haifa, but that does not mean that they do not matter. On the contrary: “It only means that they are successful.” Their job is to introduce “official ideology into aspects of everyday life.” That they do so subconsciously is far from a weakness. “This is their real power: that we don’t pay attention to them.”
[Paragraph 5] Politicians have long understood this. In Berlin in 1945, at the end of the war, the Russian-dominated city hall met for the first time. “The city was in ruins, bodies in the canals,” says Mr Azaryahu, yet they discussed “what to do with Nazi street names.” Walk through Europe and you walk through streets whose names have been overwritten so often they are part place, part palimpsest. In Paris, the Place Royale became a Place de la République; in Germany, Adolf Hitler Platzes spread—then vanished; in Berlin, streets ran towards the Berlin Wall with one name, and emerged on the other side with another.