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对英国人而言，无论你私底下对自己有多么满意，也不应该说I'm good…… On a recent short flight, an air hostess offered a snack[1] to an enormously fat American lady sitting next to me. “No, thank you,” she said, “I’m good.” If the question of what people eat is a moral one, she looked as if she hadn’t always been good, to put it mildly.[2] Nowadays, when you ask people how they are, they are as likely to tell you that they are good as that they are well. It is as if you were inquiring after their moral rather than their bodily condition. Of course, the two have seldom been more closely linked, health, diet and safety having replaced faith, hope and charity as the desiderata of the virtuous life.[3] Since so many modern illnesses are the consequence of overindulgence[4] in one thing or another, an inquiry after health is indeed a moral one. Oh Lord, we have eaten those things that we ought not to have eaten, and not eaten those things that we ought to have eaten. To English ears of a certain age, however, it still sounds strange for someone to say, in any sense whatever, that he is good. Surely, that is for someone else to say? One doesn’t blow one’s own trumpet[5], however pleased with oneself one secretly is. “I’m good”—so often heard these days—has a complacent and almost boastful ring,[6] very different from that of “I’m well, thank you.” No one could say, “I’m good, thanks be to God[7].” No one is good by mere luck or good fortune, let alone by divine mercy.[8] | 
