uptodate2 thirtysomething transcript 070302, Languages, English, Learning, bbc, BBC Radio Learning, words in the ... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Keep your English up to date
Thirty-something
Professor David Crystal
This phrase, ‘thirty-something’, it came in in the 1980s
referring to people of an unspecified age between 30 and
40. These were members of the baby boom, the people
who were born 20, 30 years before and entering their 30s
now and not knowing how to cope – or at least, that was
the idea.
It was the name of a television series. It also became the
name of a film. People who had lost their freedom, was
the idea. Children, they’d got now, demanding jobs,
approach of middle-age, gloom! There’s a website which
says it’s ‘personal growth for thirty-somethings’.
It’s used both as an adjective – ‘she’s a thirty-something
career woman’. And it’s also used as a noun, as I just did
– ‘the thirty-somethings’.
And then, the ending got applied to others. We started to hear ‘twenty-
somethings’. And now we’ve got ‘forty-somethings’ – that was a television
show in 2003, ‘Forty-Something’.
Well, it can be any age. The implication is always that there’s a set of
values or problems associated with that age.
Me? I’m sixty-something!
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]