【文稿】英语词汇小百科：budget airlines

Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to Roundtable’s word of the week. 今天呢，我们来讨论廉价航空，budget airlines. John: Actually usually it’s more formally known as a low cost carrier or a low cost airline. It can also be called a no-frills, discount or budget airline. Xiaohua: A low cost carrier 也就是 LCC，是廉价航空正式的称呼。No-frills 这个词可能需要解释一下。 So usually I think frill means one of those decorative, female clothing things. John: Yeah, it’s a little frilly, right? It’s got lots of extra stuff on the edges. And so if you think about that, so something is frilly has got lots of extra stuff well no-frills should actually be quite obvious. Basically it’s just a service or product that the non essential features have been removed to keep the price low. Xiaohua: 对，因为frill原来指的是女士衣服上的褶边儿或者装饰，那no frills呢就是没有过多的装饰。在这里就指的是不提供那些不必要服务的这样的service John: Right and there’s actually quite a few products and service categories that call themselves no-frills. Usually it’s going to be airlines, supermarkets sometimes vacations and even cars. Xiaohua: 嗯。所以不光是航空公司可以说是no-frills airlines, 还有超市和旅行社给你定制的旅行计划等等，都可以说是no-frills. John: Right. So these days a lot of times when we’re talking about these no-frills or cheaper airlines, well, a lot of times we call them budget airlines. And so budget basically just means in this sense, cheap. Because usually the word budget itself usually refers to when a person when a company when a family are coming up with a list of incomes and expenses, and if something is budget it means it won’t affect your budget. Xiaohua: Budget作名词的时候一般我们知道是预算的意思，但是它当作形容词的时候也可以作为cheap，价格低廉的意思。So in this sense it’s used as an adjective. John: And interestingly enough the English word “budget” is actually derived from the French word bougette which actually means purse. Xiaohua: 所以廉价航空其实是钱包航空。That’s a weird way of putting it. John: Well you know, English is a very weird language. Xiaohua: Yeah that’s right. What else can you use with budget that means cheap? John: Budget rental cars, ummmmm Xiaohua: budget travel? John: yeah I mean when we look at a lot of these things really it’s just about whether the industry has a segment identifying themselves as cheaper. A budget TV, I mean pretty much anything, just when you’re calling it cheap, when someone’s trying to sell it to you maybe you don’t have very much money to spend, they’ll call it a budget something or other. Xiaohua: And that wraps up Roundtable’s word of the week. John: Yay!