时髦英语口语词汇讲解第43期:Toyboy

toyboy
玩具男伴

There's a class of very unusual words in English, they're called "reduplications" or "reduplicated forms": "bow wow, says the dog".
英语当中有一类特殊的词，它们被称之为“叠词”，比如：bowwow (汪汪)——狗叫的声音。

Well, you can hear the reduplication, the two words are almost the same, it's just the first part changes: "helter-skelter", "namby-pamby"...
喏，你能听出这种重叠的效果，两个单词几乎是一摸一样的，只是第一个字母不同而已。例如："helter-skelter"慌慌张张，"namby-pamby"（多愁善感，矫情）。

Words like this are reduplicated forms, and new ones are really rather unusual.
像这样的一类词被称为叠词，叠词出现是极其罕见的。

But "toy boy" has come along in the last 10 or 15 years. It's British slang, from the 1980s.
但是在过去的10年或是15年间，却出现了“toyboy”这个词。 这个词是个英式俚语，20世纪80年代开始被人们使用。

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".
它指的是一个迷人的年轻男人被另外一个人保养——被一个年长的人，关键的地方就在这里：这个年轻人被当做“小情人”给养起来了。

It's the rhyme that made it popular.
实际上是这种押韵让这些词变得流行起来的。

"Toy girl" seems rather boring by comparison.
相比之下，“toy girl”听起来可就乏味得多啦（没有押韵嘛）。