时髦英语口语词汇讲解第38期:Saddo! 可怜虫!

Saddo
可怜虫

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.
英语中有很多近亲词，这些词的词末字母通常会让单词听起来更亲近，更通俗实用。

Ammunition becomes 'ammo'; a weird person becomes 'weirdo'; aggravation becomes 'aggro'.
Ammunition（军火） 成了ammo。一个奇怪的人变成了 weirdo（怪人；怪胎）。aggravation （恶化）变成了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.
澳大利亚人最喜欢这样用了： 下午好，他们不会说good afternoon, 他们会说“arvo”。 在澳大利亚， Arvo 是afternoon的缩写。

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.
在20世纪90年代，我们有了saddo这个词。它是由形容词 sad 加上两个 o而得来的：saddo。

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.
这个词可不是个礼貌用语。 它嘲笑社交白痴和土包子，在某种程度上带有蔑视。

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.
你可能会听到某人说—“哦，那人挺‘杯具’的“，或者“她是个十足的可怜虫。” 用在男人和女人身上都可以。

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.
这个词当然是来自sad ，这得追溯到20世纪30年代了。那个时候，sad不是指悲伤而是衍生出了另外一个意思：“可怜”。

It's a sense in other words that's been developing for quite a long time.
sad的这层意思已经存在很久了，只是表述的方式不同。

In actual fact, you can take that sense of sad and trace it all the way back to Shakespeare, although he never said 'saddo'.
实际上sad的这个用法可以直接追溯到莎士比亚时代，当然，那个时候，他可不会用saddo这样的字眼。