Xiaohua: Hello and welcome to Roundtable’s word of the week. 今天呢，我們來討論廉價航空，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，是廉價航空正式的稱呼。No-frills
這個詞可能需要解釋一下。
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: 對，因為frill原來指的是女士衣服上的褶邊兒或者裝飾，那no
frills呢就是沒有過多的裝飾。在這里就指的是不提供那些不必要服務(wù)的這樣的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說是no-frills airlines, 還有超市和旅行社給你定制的旅行計劃等等，都可以說是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作名詞的時候一般我們知道是預(yù)算的意思，但是它當作形容詞的時候也可以作為cheap，價格低廉的意思。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: 所以廉價航空其實是錢包航空。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!