时髦英语口语词汇讲解第37期:Prenup!

Prenup
婚前协议

We often abbreviate words by dropping the endings.
缩写词一般是不要末尾的那一部分。

There's a technical term for it in linguistics - they're called clippings.
在语言学上我们称之为“截断法”。

I suppose the word 'ad' is the most familiar, from advertisements.
我个人认为由advertisements这个词而来的ad（广告）最为人所知。

'Pram' is another, from perambulator, and nobody uses that these days, really.
pram”(婴儿车，巡视者)来自单词 “perambulator”，现在已经没有多少人用了。

“And now, we've got 'pre-nup' which came in in the 1980s I suppose.
如今我们又有了prenup（婚前协议）这个词，应该是出自20世纪80年代，我觉得。

It's short for pre-nuptial agreement.
Prenup是prenuptial（婚前协议）的简称。

In other words, it's two people who're coming together, and they're going to get married, they're going to have their nuptials, they're going to get married - and because they think the marriage is not going to last for very long and there's going to be a messy divorce, where they're going to have to split all their worldly goods, they decide to have a pre-nup, which is an agreement, a pre-nuptial agreement, where they decide who's going to have what, and it's going to save a lot of mess in due course.
换句话说，就是两个人在一起，准备结婚，于是会签一份婚前协议；两个人马上要结婚了，但是因为觉得这份婚姻可能不会长久而离婚又可能会有很多麻烦,例如离婚的时候，他们需要对共同的财产进行分割。所以， 婚前，人们会签一份协议，也就是一份同意书，这份同意书会规定离婚后双方所能得到的东西，用这样的一种方式，在一定的时候会省掉很多麻烦。

Funny idea really....but very popular amongst American film stars apparently.
也学这种做法很荒唐好笑，但是在美国影星夫妇中极其常见。

Well, it isn't modern, actually. The earliest time I ever found any reference to it is 1916.
呃，实际上“婚前协议”这个词并不是现代才有的。我发现最早在1916年这个词就出现了。

So, it was very common in the United States during the 20th century and is increasing elsewhere.
在20世纪的美国，pre-nuptial已经变得很常见，在别处也在变得越来越普遍。

But the clipping, the abbreviated form, is very recent - I've only heard that since the 1980s.
但是，这个词的缩略形式却是最近才有的，是从20世纪80年代才开始被使用的。

How do you write it? Well some people write it pre hyphen nup,
你是怎么写这个词的呢？呃，有些人写成pre-nup；

but increasingly these days they've been dropping the hyphen, and the two elements are written solid, without any space or any hyphen in-between.
但是现在越来越多的人会省掉连字符，把pre和nup直接写在一起。

The words have come together....not so of course the people they refer to!
两个词变成了真正意义上的一个词，但是，签prenup的人可不见得也会这样合二为一。