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英语听力精选进阶版 11220
Mwah! Professor David Crystal You've seen it on television, or in the street, hundreds of times, thousands of times. Two people come towards each other, they obviously know each other very well, and they start to kiss each other - but it's not a full
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英语听力精选进阶版 11221
Phwoar! Professor David Crystal Interjections are words which express emotions and some of them are very old: words like 'cooer', 'gosh' or 'phew'. You don't get new interjections very often, but one did arrive in the 1980s. It was a sort of expressi
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英语听力精选进阶版 11222
Spam Professor David Crystal Technology always has an influence on language. When printing came in, it brought new words into the language. When broadcasting first started new words came into the language. And now the internet has come along so its n
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英语听力精选进阶版 11223
Prenup Professor David Crystal We often abbreviate words by dropping the endings. There's a technical term for it in linguistics - they're called clippings. I suppose the word 'ad' is the most familiar, from advertisements. 'Pram' is another, from pe
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英语听力精选进阶版 11224
Showbiz Professor David Crystal This is probably one of the most popular abbreviations of a word that took place in the 20th century in the United States. It's an abbreviation - showbiz - of show business. And, to begin with, it was written as two se
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英语听力精选进阶版 11225
Toy boy Professor David Crystal There's a class of very unusual words in English, they're called reduplications or reduplicated forms: bow wow, says the dog. Well, you can hear the reduplication, the two words are almost the same, its just the first
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英语听力精选进阶版 11226
Happy-clappy Professor David Crystal This is one of those reduplicated words, where the two words are almost the same, but they just change one little part: change the vowel, or change the consonants in this particular case - usually the consonant at
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英语听力精选进阶版 11227
Hotdesking You know, there are some very descriptive words that come into the language from time to time, and one of the ones that came in the 1990s which really hit me between the eyes when I first heard it, was this phrase hotdesking. In fact to be
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英语听力精选进阶版 11228
Estuary Professor David Crystal Words based on locations don't become part of the general language very often. You do get a few I mean people talk about Whitehall meaning the government, or the White House in America, meaning the American government,
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英语听力精选进阶版 11229
Euro No named part of the world has introduced more new words into English than Europe. It's all happened of course in the last 10 or 20 years, and it's this 'euro' prefix that's caused all the attention to be focussed upon the area of Europe. The eu
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英语听力精选进阶版 11230
Luvvy Professor David Crystal Have you noticed how common the 'y' ('ie') ending is in English as a sort of colloquial suffix? A familiarity marker perhaps is a better way of talking about it. You talk about the telly it's a television. You talk about
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英语听力精选进阶版 11231
Saddo Professor David Crystal There are quite a few familiarity markers in English words which take on an ending to make the word sound much more familiar, or everyday, or down to earth. Ammunition becomes 'ammo'; a weird person becomes 'weirdo'; agg
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英语听力精选进阶版 11232
Gobsmacked Professor David Crystal English loves compound words: 'washing machine' and all that sort of thing. But when you get a compound word, the two parts of the compound are usually stylistically very homogeneous, in other words, they are the sa
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英语听力精选进阶版 11233
Keep your English up to date Bog standard Professor David Crystal It's pretty rare in English to find a compound word with a slang first part and a formal second part. Bog standard is one of those that's come in in the last few years. It meanswhat do
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英语听力精选进阶版 11234
Keep your English up to date Wannabe Professor David Crystal A very unusual feature of SOME languages, and of English in particular, is that you can have phrases that can be used as words: a phrase used as a word! 'Wannabe' is a good case in point. I
