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A jalopy is a very old car in bad shape — rusty, noisy, maybe held together with luck. It is a humorous, informal word, more American than British, and it sounds a bit old-fashioned now; younger speakers are more likely to say wreck, beater, or (in Britain) old banger. You would not use jalopy in a garage report. Nobody is quite sure where the word came from. It first shows up in writing in 1924. One guess is that it is linked to Jalapa (now Xalapa) in Mexico, because used cars from New Orleans were often sent to scrapyards there in the 1920s — but that is only a perhaps, not a proven story.
老爺車
組成Unknown. Perhaps from Jalapa, Mexico (now Xalapa), to whose scrapyards used cars were often sent from New Orleans starting in the 1920s. First recorded in writing in 1924.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
jalopynoun/d͡ʒəˈlɒ.pi/
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An old, dilapidated or unpretentious automobile.
- Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles.
- "We ran into some real excitement," Frank said, and told his father the whole story of Chet's missing jalopy, the wrecked car which they suspected had been a stolen one also, and the attempted holdup at the ferryboat office.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。