英语听力精选进阶版 11217（在线收听）

Alcopops 

Professor David Crystal 

One of the big questions always with a language is: “how do new 

words come into being?”. Well, you can borrow them from other 

languages of course;  a lot of English words are like that. But one 

of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend 

– and a blend is when you run two words together to make a 

third word. And people have done it since the beginning of English 

actually. To take a recent example:  alcopops – carbonated fruit 

flavoured drinks containing alcohol – a very controversial thing this 

was when they first came in a few years ago, because it was 

obviously being aimed at children, and people were very 

concerned that children would now have some alcohol introduced 

into them that they weren’t expecting.  

But it’s the word I want to talk about today – a very interesting 

word indeed!  Alco-pops. Alco is obviously the first part of the 

word, shortened version of “alcohol”. And pops is the second part 

of the word. Pop you might not know so much about. It has quite a long-standing 

usage. It’s basically the word for lemonade once upon a time. Pop bottles – 

because of the sound that’s made when a cork is drawn out of an effervescing 

drink – that sort of sound! – and pops suddenly became a very quick sound 

symbolic way of expressing that kind of  notion; so the two words have come 

together:  alcohol and pop …and becomes alco-pops.  

There are lots of words like this in English. Brunch is another one – for a mixture 

of breakfast and lunch, and you can actually have quite a fun game making these 

blends up yourself. For instance, if you decide that you want to invent a cross 

between a helicopter and a bicycle shall we say?  Well, make a blend about it. You 

could call it a “helicycle” for instance, or maybe a “bicopter”.