英语听力精选进阶版 11233（在线收听）

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 means…what does it 

mean? It means to be basic, to be ordinary, to be unexceptional, 

to be uninspired – it just means ordinary. If you say something is 

'bog standard', you mean it is perfectly ordinary. "He's got a bog 

standard car" means a perfectly ordinary car. "I've got a bog 

standard library book" means I've got a perfectly ordinary library 

book that's not exceptional or interesting in any way.  

It's a British slang thing; its origin is quite obscure; nobody quite 

knows where it came from. Some people think that it's actually 

from early motorbike sales, because motorbikes used to come in 

a very large box you know when they were delivered – you 

didn't sort of drive them away, they were delivered. They came 

in what's called 'box standard' – and then that became 'bog 

standard'; in other words, out of the box, it's a perfectly ordinary 

kind of delivery, or ordinary kind of a bike that you bought.  

But people don't like that and they think that it's got a much more interesting 

etymology than that: a bog of course is a slang word for toilet in British English, 

and some people think that 'bog standard' has that kind of origin. Don't see it 

myself, somehow. I rather like the idea that bog means something rural, you know 

– the rural people are often in the bog, 'cause the bog's a muddy sort of area, full 

of peat and things like that. And so bog is often used to mean 'unsophisticated'. 

So I don't know: there's three possible etymologies for it; nobody quite knows 

where it comes from. It may have an ordinary meaning, but it certainly isn't an 

ordinary word.