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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'; aggravation becomes 'aggro'. 

They like it in Australia a lot – "good afternoon", they don't say 

that so often, but 'arvo', 'arvo' is the abbreviation for afternoon in 

Australia.  

And in the 1990s you had this rather interesting word 'saddo' – 

that's the adjective sad with this 'o' ending, spelt with two ds: s-a-d-d-o. It came in as a kind of a rude word really, a mocking word 

for somebody seen as socially inadequate, or somehow rather 

unfashionable, or contemptible in some way. You might hear 

somebody say, "oh, he's a real saddo" or "she's a real saddo" – it 

can be for male or for females.  

It's from the word 'sad' of course, from oh, way back in the 1930s, where 'sad' 

here doesn't mean miserable, it means pathetic, and that was a use of sad that 

came in at that time. It's a sense in other words that's been developing for quite a 

long time. In actual fact, you can take that sense of sad and trace it all the way back 

to Shakespeare, although he never said 'saddo'. 

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