Pikey

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Pikey is a pejorative slang term used, mainly in England to refer to travellers, gypsies or people of low social class.

Contents

[edit] Nineteenth-century usage

The Oxford English Dictionary traced the earliest use of "pikey" to The Times in August 1838, which referred to strangers who had come to the Isle of Sheppey as "pikey-men".[1] In 1847, J. O. Halliwell in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words recorded the use of "pikey" to mean a gipsy.[1] In 1887, W. D. Parish and W. F. Shaw in the Dictionary of Kentish Dialect recorded the use of the word to mean "a turnpike traveller; a vagabond; and so generally a low fellow".[1]

[edit] Contemporary usage

More recently it was applied to Irish Travellers and non-Roma Gypsies.[2][3] In the late 20th century, it came to be used to describe "a lower-class person, regarded as coarse or disreputable."[1][4]

Pikey's most common contemporary use is not as a term for the Gypsy ethnic group, but as a catch-all phrase to refer to people, of any ethnic group, who travel around with no fixed abode.

Pikey is also commonly used to describe someone living in a caravan (not necessarily a Romani) and a "half pikey" is someone who lives in a caravan but owns the land it occupies.[citation needed]

Among English Romani Gypsies the term Pikey refers to a Traveller that is not Romani. In the book In the life of a Romany gypsy, published in 1973 and written by the respectable Romani author Manfri Frederick Wood, the term pikey is used by Romani Gypsies to refer to a member who has been cast out of the family. According to Manfri, if a member of the family is hot headed or a thief or a trouble maker or brings misfortune on the family, then a family council will be held and that member will be cast out of the family and will have to stay out of the way for ever more. They are regarded as never having even been a part of the family.[citation needed]

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the definition became even looser and is sometimes used to refer to a wide section of the (generally urban) underclass of the country, or merely a person of any social class who "lives on the cheap". This seems to be the meaning intended by Stephen Fry in an episode of QI, grouping together "hoodies, pikeys and chavs", and intimating that these people are of a sort who "go out on the town, beating people up and drinking Bacardi Breezers".

Negative English attitudes towards "pikeys" were a running theme in the 2000 Guy Ritchie film Snatch. In 2003 one of the Lewes Bonfire Societies burned a family of Travellers in effigy inside a caravan. The number plate on the caravan read P1KEY. A storm of protests and accusations of racism rapidly followed [5][6]. Twelve members of the society were arrested but the Crown Prosecution Service decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed on a charge of 'incitement to racial hatred'.[7]

The American terms "trailer trash" and "white trash" are similar in the condescension and disdain with which they are used, though the stereotypes differ in some particulars.

Recent examples of the word's use on British television include Shameless (opening quote from the show "Come and see Pikeys makin' a mess of their lives"), The Catherine Tate Show and a BBC documentary, "The Class System and Me" about the politician John Prescott.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^  John Ayto (Editor) (1999). The Oxford Dictionary of Slang. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-863157-X. 
  2. ^  T. F. Hoad (Editor) (1986). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-283098-8. 
  3. ^  Tony Thorne (1990). Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ISBN 0-7475-4594-4. 

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Oxford English Dictionary
  2. ^ news.bbc.co.uk, How offensive is the word pikey'?
  3. ^ mirror.co.uk, Formula 1 commentator in 'pikey' Ofcom probe
  4. ^ news.bbc.co.uk, How offensive is the word 'pikey'?
  5. ^ http://archive.theargus.co.uk/2003/10/29/123401.html - Local newspaper article about the Lewes protest
  6. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/nov/16/raceintheuk.uknews - National newspaper article about the Lewes protests
  7. ^ Carey, Rachel (2007). "Safe Communities Initiative: case studies Contingency Planning in Firle". Commission for Racial Equality. http://83.137.212.42/sitearchive/cre/about/sci/casestudy9_firle.html. Retrieved on 2009-07-16. 
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