英语听力精选进阶版 11225（在线收听）

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, it’s just the first part changes: "helter-skelter", "namby-pamby"... 

Words like this are reduplicated forms, and new ones are really 

rather unusual. But "toy boy" has come along in the last 10 or 15 

years. It's British slang, from the 1980s. It refers to an attractive 

young man being kept as a lover by another person, by an older 

person, that’s the crucial thing: the older person is keeping the 

younger man as that person’s "toy boy".  

It’s the rhyme that made it popular. "Toy girl" seems rather boring 

by comparison.