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A townie is a person from a town or city, said by someone who is pointing out that this person knows nothing about the countryside. It is a label thrown across a gap. The picture behind it: someone arrives in a village in clean white shoes, is of a cow, cannot tell wheat from grass, complains that it is too quiet at night — and a local says, half-laughing, 'townie'. The feeling of the word matters more than the definition. It is rude. Not a terrible insult, not a word that starts a fight, but never a compliment — it says 'you are soft, you are out of place here'. Friends use it to tease each other. You would not use it about someone you had just met. There is a second use, mainly in British university towns like Oxford or Cambridge. There, students call the local residents townies, and the locals call the students something less polite back. It is the old 'town and gown' split — the university on one side, the ordinary town on the other — and 'townie' is the students' side of it. Same shape of word: us in here, them out there. And sometimes, in some parts of Britain, townie just means a rough young person who hangs around the town centre. Which use you are meeting depends entirely on who is speaking. If a farmer says it, they mean the city person; if a student says it, they probably mean a local. One last thing: a person can say it about themselves, and then it is warm rather than sharp. 'I'm a townie, I admit it — I've never even seen a sheep close up.' Turning the word on yourself takes the sting out of it. That is a very common English move.
都市俗、城市來的外行人（帶點取笑，說對方不懂鄉下事）；在大學城裡另指「非學生的本地居民」
組成town + -ie. The -ie ending makes a person-word out of the thing they belong to, and it always adds a feeling — sometimes affectionate, sometimes belittling, and here mostly belittling. Same ending as in foodie, newbie, roadie.
同家族的字
- townthe root — a townie is 'a town person'
- townshipsame town, plus -ship
- townspeoplesame town — the neutral word for the people of a town
- newbiesame person-making -ie, and the same faintly looking-down feeling
- foodiesame person-making -ie — someone defined by what they're into
原始詞典資料9 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。
Townienoun
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A person from Charlestown, Massachusetts, (especially) a working-class person of Irish American heritage.
- Racial isolation is so strong that in the early 1970s there were only 388 blacks among the 38,488 residents of South Boston, and only 76 among the 15,353 “Townies” of Charlestown.
- By fall 1974, however, new impulses broke through and on September 25, three hundred Townies organized the Charlestown branch of ROAR
townienoun詞源 1/ˈtaʊni/
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A person living in a university area who is not associated with the university.
- Professional gamblers have a cushy racket in college football because old grads and even townies of college localities are sentimental bettors and easy to separate from their money.
- School is an ivory tower on the hill; it nestles in the gated groves of academe. It’s residents do not mix with “townies.”
- 2
A person who has moved from a town or city to a rural area. Especially, one who is perceived not to have adopted rural ways.
- [Hamlet] was only repeating the phrase of an ordinary English rustic when jeering at a “townie”—whom he suspected of being a gutter-snipe—that “He don’t know a hawk from a hernshaw”.
- From being a born-and-bred townie from north London, to a 36-year-old part-time farmer and full-time businessman is no mean achievement.
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A person familiar with the town (urbanised centre of a city) and with going out on the town; a street-wise person.
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derogatoryA chav.
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A working-class citizen in a metropolitan area.
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informalA person who lives in a city or town, or has an urban outlook.
- Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying, rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the faint-hearted [...] comforting the panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once tending the dying who had no friends — the men without "townies"[.]
- Here I parted with my fellow-townies, whose home shed at Millhouses covers fields where I played as a child.
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informalA person who lives in a city or town, or has an urban outlook.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
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。