据说迈克尔·杰克逊自6月故去以来的收入已经超过了7000万美元，你能想象吗？《福布斯》杂志似乎从几年前就已经注意到了这样的“已故名人”效应，所以，他们推出了每年的“已故名人收入榜”。

The trouble with having some famous person endorsing¹ your products is that they can — and often will — say or do things that adversely² affect your reputation. How good it would be to have a celebrity³ on board who could be guaranteed to be the epitome⁴ of discretion⁵, always there but always on message. This is part of what lies behind a slang term of the marketing⁶ and entertainment business that has recently started to appear in media addressed to the wider world: deleb, short for “dead celebrity”.

找名人为产品代言的麻烦就是他们有时会说出或者做出一些影响产品声誉的事情。如果能找到一位名人，可以保证其言行无误、随时候命但永远无法亲见，那该多好啊。这就是最近市场营销和娱乐业中一个俚语开始在媒体中广泛出现的部分原因，这个词就是deleb，“已故名人”英文表达的缩写。

On 29 October 2009 newspapers reported Forbes magazine’s annual list of the Top-Earning Dead Celebrities⁷. This put Yves Saint Laurent at the top, followed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, with Michael Jackson coming third. The income of these delebs proves the truth of the old saying — sometimes death really can be a good career move.

2009年10月29日，很多报纸都报道了福布斯年度已故名人收入榜。伊夫·圣·罗兰居首，理查德·罗杰斯和奥斯卡·哈默斯坦恩紧随其后，迈克尔·杰克逊位列第三。这个排行榜证明了那句老话——有时候死亡可以让事业更进一步。

You'd think that the word delebrity would just be the longer version of deleb, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In most usages, a delebrity is a famous fashion designer (designer + celebrity).

你可能会以为delebrity是deleb的加长版形式，但其实不是的。大多数情况下，delebrity指的是有名的时尚设计师，是designer（设计师）和celebrity（名人）的合成词形式。