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Toy boy
Professor David Crystal
There's a class of very unusual words in English, they're called
"reduplications" or "reduplicated forms": "bow wow, says the dog".
Well, you can hear the reduplication, the two words are almost
the same, it s just the first part changes: "helter-skelter", "namby-
pamby"...
Words like this are reduplicated forms, and new ones are really
rather unusual. But "toy boy" has come along in the last 10 or 15
years. It's British slang, from the 1980s. 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".
It s the rhyme that made it popular. "Toy girl" seems rather boring
by comparison.
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