Opinion
“This society has bred mistrust and violence,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a historian of Communist China’s elite-level machinations over the past half century. “Leaders know you have to watch your back because you never know who will put a knife in it.”
《中英對照讀新聞》Berlin granny, 90, fights off trio of thieves 90歲柏林阿嬤擊退小偷三人組
◎魏國金
A granny in Germany made short work of three suspected robbers who tricked their way into her Berlin apartment Friday as she celebrated her 90th birthday, police said.
德國一名阿嬤俐落解決了3名搶嫌；週五當她慶祝自己90歲生日時，這3人騙過她而進入她柏林的公寓，警方說。
The trio, a woman and two men, rang the doorbell of her flat in the eastern district of Hellersdorf and said they were there to attend the granny’s birthday party.
由一女兩男組成的這三人組按了她位在柏林東區黑勒斯多夫的公寓門鈴，並說他們來此是要參加老奶奶的慶生會。
The pensioner, whose birthday it actually was, became suspicious however when the woman asked her for a drink of water and then tried to hold a towel in front of her face.
領養老金的阿嬤確實要過生日，而當該女向她要一杯水喝，接著試圖在她眼前抓住一條手巾時，阿嬤起了疑心。
"She hit the con artist in the face. At the same time she pushed one of the men out the door, at which point the trio fled," police said in a statement. "The senior was unharmed." A police unit responsible for such scams opened a probe.
「她打這個騙子的臉，同時將當中的一名男子推出門外， 就在此時，3人落荒而逃，」警方聲明說，「老人家毫髮無傷。」負責偵辦這類行騙手法的警察單位已展開調查。
新聞辭典
fight off︰擊退、竭力擺脫，例如︰fight off sleep（克服睡意）。fight back則有強忍之意。例句︰The CEO fought back tears during his farewell address.（執行長在發表告別演說時強忍眼淚。）
make short work of︰迅速解決、快速幹掉。例句︰The boy was anxious to get to the movies, so he made short work of his homework.（這男孩急於去看電影，所以很快的把作業做完。）
con artist︰騙人老手、騙子。con當名詞指騙局，動詞指哄騙，例句︰He’s conned me for a treat.（他哄騙我請客。）
make short work of
Complete or consume quickly, as in The children made short work of the ice cream, or They made short work of cleaning up so they could get to the movies. This term, first recorded in 1577, in effect means "to turn something into a brief task."
The con artist is a specific type of fictional character who, having raised the techniques of deception, ingratiation, and tomfoolery to the level of an art form, cultivates the confidence of others to garner profit or the favors of the opposite sex or an avenue for escape. Superior wit; skill in the use of resources, including disguise; adaptability; savoir faire; charm; and a continual desire to better his or her condition—these are some of the attributes of the con artist at work to trick, beguile, maneuver, or manipulate others. Since the confidence game is generated by and predicated upon the human foibles of the victim, the con artist's operations serve the turn of the satirist, the moralist, the critic of society who brings into view a world of dubious and doubting humanity, one that is populated by cheats, imposters, and fools.
The range of the con artist is immense. Among the British, Randolph Mason, a skilled, unscrupulous lawyer, cons his clients in Melville Davisson Post's The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896). Arthur Morrison's less-than-honest private detective, Horace Dorrington, is both con man and thief in The Dorrington Deed Box (1897). Romney Pringle, a creation of R. Austin Freeman and John James Pitcairn writing as Clifford Ashdown, poses as a literary agent who earns a living by swindling crooks out of their ill-gotten gains in The Adventures of Romney Pringle (1902). Dr. James Shepard, the narrator in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), is a man of many masks: a moral monster, liar, black-mailer, and greedy gambler, who manipulates characters and readers alike with great guile and without any remorse. Constantine Dix is both lay preacher and thief in Barry Pain's The Memoirs of Constantine Dix (1905). Milward Kennedy created Sir George Bull in Bull's Eye (1933; Corpse in Cold Storage, 1934), a con man who assumes the role of a private detective to gain entrance to a wealthy social circle.
One version of the con artist is the gentleman thief exemplified by E. W. Hornung's A. J. Raffles, cricketeer, gentleman, and thief in The Amateur Cracksman (1899; Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman). Writing as Barry Perowne, Philip Atkey imitates Hornung with his own gentleman-gone-astray, Raffles, in Raffles After Dark (1933; The Return of Raffles). The American master of parody, J. Kendrick Bangs, builds several stories around the adventures of Raffles's wife transplanted to American high society. She expands her name to Henriette Van Raffles and thrives in the heyday of Newport, Rhode Island, in Mrs. Raffles: Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman (1905). Another American, Christopher B. Booth, created that Chicagoan “confidence man de luxe,” the title character of two volumes, Mr. Clackworthy (1926) and Mr. Clackworthy, Con Man (1927).
Particularly in America, the con artist emerged as a distinct literary convention in the 1830s out of an ancestry of seducers, pranksters, devils, or rogues. So suspicious are characters of each other in the American form of the genre that we can never be sure whether some apparently decent and good-hearted person may in fact be practicing pious fraud. Frederick Anderson introduces a master thief in Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (1914), and Frank L. Packard's Jimmie Dale (The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, 1917) poses as a New York club man, a crook dubbed the Gray Seal, an underworld figure called Larry the Bat, and an unsuccessful artist known as Smarlinghue.
Gamblers, swindlers, hypocrites, and falsifiers also appear in the hard-boiled private eye novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. In these authors' sometimes sordid and always cynical worlds, the rich make their fortunes through various scams, double crosses, and violent murders; the police, who should be able to see through these machinations, are instead incompetent and corrupt. If there is a sucker born every minute, there is also a con artist born to take advantage of human gullibility for his own selfish purposes.
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