Diemazz

Look up Pikey in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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

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]

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 joke in the 2000 Guy Ritchie film Snatch.

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 The Catherine Tate Show and a BBC documentary, "The Class System and Me" about the politician John Prescott.

See also

• Didicoy
• Irish Traveller
• New Age travellers
• Romani people

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. 

External links

• Anger over 'pikey' slur (BBC News)
• Davidson exits after TV gay row (BBC News) - (use of 'pikey' by Marco Pierre White)
• How offensive is the word 'pikey'? (BBC News)
• Brundle escapes punishment for 'pikey' comment (Planet F1)

Notes

Site Map: RSS 2.0

Recent Searches: Guyuan
Pikey
control lock
Pereslavl Zalessky
Rhim Gazelle
Full lyric soprano
canadian immigration law
Pileni
Potassium hydroxide
Troff

Related Pages: