英语听力精选进阶版 11231

（单词翻译）

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. Ammunition¹ becomes 'ammo'; a 

weird² person becomes 'weirdo'; aggravation³ 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 inadequate⁴, or somehow rather 

unfashionable, or contemptible⁵ 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 miserable⁶, 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'.