Continually Hearing Asinine Vernacular
November 10, 2014 4:44 AM Subscribe
"The endurance of "chav" reflects the new meanness of the UK, a hardening of the so-called squeezed middle while the safety net of the welfare state is stripped." Chav - slur, social descriptor, element of nostalgia, or fodder for trend forecasters?
This isn't a new meanness, unless you were born before the 1980s. It's just the newest word for "oik."
posted by kewb at 4:46 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by kewb at 4:46 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
I actually haven't come across it for a while, but then I'm not exactly at the cutting edge of contemporary popular culture. Nice work with the title, BTW.
posted by Segundus at 4:55 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Segundus at 4:55 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
The eternal battle between the Chavs and the Chav-nots.
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:05 AM on November 10, 2014 [21 favorites]
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:05 AM on November 10, 2014 [21 favorites]
Yeah, as a concept it doesn't seem very new: derogatory terms for lower class 'undesirables' have been around for ever, e.g. 'villain'.
I've sort of grown up with the word - it first appeared on the scene when I was in my early teens - so it's difficult to separate out the word's evolution from my experiences. However, there are a few things that I've noticed. Initially, although it was a rude word to use, it felt no different to any other insult. That all changed a few years later when it was co-opted by our parents, and started turning up in the dictionary and in the papers. It seemed that the adult audience gave it a legitimacy, though it may have just been that my friends were growing up a bit. What is interesting is that the word managed to jump the youth / adult vocabulary barrier, when the rest of the shitty slurs that we flung about as kids never got close. The fact that chav made it, when any racial/homophobic/sexist insults were shot down in flames illustrates the massive blind spot that middle England still has when it comes to class, (case in point, I recently watched a guardian video about cyclists skipping red lights, and commenter helpfully pointed out "most of those weren't cyclists, just chavs on bikes"). Despite all of that, I do think people are more careful to use it these days, recently, I've had the pleasure of watching a few massive facebook arguments about it's usage, without even starting them myself.
Finally, if anyone thinks it's a genuine 'social descriptor' (whatever that means) and not a derogatory term, the (fake) etymology that was going around with it when I first heard it, was that it stood for 'Council House And Violent'.
posted by Ned G at 5:28 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
I've sort of grown up with the word - it first appeared on the scene when I was in my early teens - so it's difficult to separate out the word's evolution from my experiences. However, there are a few things that I've noticed. Initially, although it was a rude word to use, it felt no different to any other insult. That all changed a few years later when it was co-opted by our parents, and started turning up in the dictionary and in the papers. It seemed that the adult audience gave it a legitimacy, though it may have just been that my friends were growing up a bit. What is interesting is that the word managed to jump the youth / adult vocabulary barrier, when the rest of the shitty slurs that we flung about as kids never got close. The fact that chav made it, when any racial/homophobic/sexist insults were shot down in flames illustrates the massive blind spot that middle England still has when it comes to class, (case in point, I recently watched a guardian video about cyclists skipping red lights, and commenter helpfully pointed out "most of those weren't cyclists, just chavs on bikes"). Despite all of that, I do think people are more careful to use it these days, recently, I've had the pleasure of watching a few massive facebook arguments about it's usage, without even starting them myself.
Finally, if anyone thinks it's a genuine 'social descriptor' (whatever that means) and not a derogatory term, the (fake) etymology that was going around with it when I first heard it, was that it stood for 'Council House And Violent'.
posted by Ned G at 5:28 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
The Vice article's interesting, because it talks about the chav's role in class differentiation. But it misses the fact that this differentiation is not only top down but horizontal: the chav label can be a way of expressing the age old "rough"/"respectable" distinction within the working class. Owen Hatherley talks about this in a review of Owen Jones's latest book in the LRB:
Jones quickly and rightly dismisses the [chav] stereotype before moving on, but the stereotype has a habit of butting its way back in, and ... that’s because of Jones’s deafness to the appeal that the ruling class has directed towards a section of the working class since 1979: the promise of a rearranged, if in no way fairer, set of criteria for admission to the ruling class, and a carefully targeted neo-Victorian discourse of class differentiation. Chavs acknowledges but doesn’t explore the fact that the success of the term ‘chav’, and the screw-the-person-immediately-below-me rhetoric that comes with it, owes much to the old differentiation within the working class between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. Jones misses the power of what the blogger Alex Williams has defined as ‘negative solidarity’ inside a demoralised, struggling and stratified proletariat. A blunt example: in the 1990s, when my father was working shifts as a sheet-metal worker, he loved to watch Harry Enfield, particularly the characters Wayne and Waynetta Slob, classic caricatures of welfare-dependent, indolent proto-‘chavs’. A Militant activist like Jones’s father, he wouldn’t have called them ‘undeserving’, he would have called them the ‘lumpen-proletariat’. That isn’t to say he was right or wrong in doing so, only that the working class is much less united than Jones would like to believe. He has, no doubt, identified a real and horrible phenomenon with real and horrible political effects, but it is useful, in trying to explain that elusive ‘and how they get away with it’, to recognise that the working class is divided against itself.posted by Sonny Jim at 5:30 AM on November 10, 2014 [5 favorites]
I think the story there is about how middle and upper class Guardian-reading Labour people lost track of the respectable working class who formed the party's backbone (perhaps because they assumed the working class were all the same or perhaps they even secretly felt a bit of disdain for the respectables who would disown their scummier brethren - do they think they're better than other people? Goodness, some of these soi-disant respectable people are vulgar racists!); and therefore ceased to address their concerns. Thatcherites, by contrast, realised that these people could be invited into a newly extended lower middle class through the sale of council houses etc, and were not at all worried about people thinking they were a cut above other people (or about the vulgarity or racism, come to that).
posted by Segundus at 5:56 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by Segundus at 5:56 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
I think the story there is about how middle and upper class Guardian-reading Labour people lost track of the respectable working class who formed the party's backbone (perhaps because they assumed the working class were all the same or perhaps they even secretly felt a bit of disdain for the respectables who would disown their scummier brethren - do they think they're better than other people? Goodness, some of these soi-disant respectable people are vulgar racists!); and therefore ceased to address their concerns. Thatcherites, by contrast, realised that these people could be invited into a newly extended lower middle class through the sale of council houses etc, and were not at all worried about people thinking they were a cut above other people (or about the vulgarity or racism, come to that).
I know this old song, even if the lyrics kept changing.
In 1964, it was "If you want a n***** for a neighbor, vote Liberal or Labour."
In the late 1970s and the 1980s it was "People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture." It was Section 28 and Thatcher talking about "a pretend family relationship." It was a billboard showing young men wearing buttons that said "gay pride" and captioned, "This is Labour's camp. Do you want to live in it?"
It's a funny kind of "concern" that casts the miners' unions as the new scum and the National Front and tits on page 3 as the face of working-class respectability.
posted by kewb at 6:13 AM on November 10, 2014 [11 favorites]
I know this old song, even if the lyrics kept changing.
In 1964, it was "If you want a n***** for a neighbor, vote Liberal or Labour."
In the late 1970s and the 1980s it was "People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture." It was Section 28 and Thatcher talking about "a pretend family relationship." It was a billboard showing young men wearing buttons that said "gay pride" and captioned, "This is Labour's camp. Do you want to live in it?"
It's a funny kind of "concern" that casts the miners' unions as the new scum and the National Front and tits on page 3 as the face of working-class respectability.
posted by kewb at 6:13 AM on November 10, 2014 [11 favorites]
Hmmm. I recently read Robert Roberts' "The Classic Slum", based on his experience and work in Salford in the early 20th century. He describes a very clear dividing line back then between the respectable and not respectable poor. Respectable poor, for example, would get to do apprenticeships and work in the mills - hard, but regular work. Those not respectable - often Irish - would be denied those educational opportunities and restricted to casual trades, like portering, and lived therefore a more precarious existence. I would wager that Protestant/Roman Catholic came into it as well. The parallels in the USA might be white poor / black poor, perhaps?
Interestingly, the First World War changed a lot of this: the demand for labour broke closed shops and enabled the not respectable (and other groups, like women) to advance. The tumult of the 20th century wars is perhaps only now dying down, after fifty years of peace and rebuilding, and society is ossifying again. This would tie in with the figures on social mobility and inequality.
posted by alasdair at 6:32 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
Interestingly, the First World War changed a lot of this: the demand for labour broke closed shops and enabled the not respectable (and other groups, like women) to advance. The tumult of the 20th century wars is perhaps only now dying down, after fifty years of peace and rebuilding, and society is ossifying again. This would tie in with the figures on social mobility and inequality.
posted by alasdair at 6:32 AM on November 10, 2014 [4 favorites]
I think this is a pretty interesting, if not destructive happening, seemingly a sort of interclass brinkmanship. We (humans) have a propensity towards drawing a line between "us" and "them" if only to make ourselves feel better.
It sort of of feels like in this instance the line is being drawn a centimeter or so below the assholes hovering above the gaping maws below. I'm not cynical enough to think this is instigated by some high-class mockery of the lower orders -- I just think humans can be pretty sucky sometimes and want to feel better about his or her respective place on the ladder.
posted by ulteriormodem at 6:32 AM on November 10, 2014
It sort of of feels like in this instance the line is being drawn a centimeter or so below the assholes hovering above the gaping maws below. I'm not cynical enough to think this is instigated by some high-class mockery of the lower orders -- I just think humans can be pretty sucky sometimes and want to feel better about his or her respective place on the ladder.
posted by ulteriormodem at 6:32 AM on November 10, 2014
Usage of the word chav in the newspapers has decreased, but it's kept steadily bubbling along by the middle classes themselves. People in the media use it freely. "Yeah, it went alright," one acquaintance, a music video producer, once confided after shooting a "gritty" promo in Tilbury, Essex, a place situated in a banlieues-like state of decay outside the M25 ring road. "A load of chavs came over and started bothering us though. Absolute scumbags."
The review of Jones' book above talks about the term as the latest in a long list of ways of distinguishing between compliant poor people and scary poor people, and this quote from the Vice article catches exactly that distinction.
The US doesn't have an exactly parallel term that I can think of, though there is definitely overlap with terms like "white trash" or "ghetto," perhaps partly because the racial makeup of each country is so different and so scary poor people get characterized differently.
There's never a reason to give a nasty name to the compliant poor people who aren't threatening and who play by the rules, because they are orderly and polite. The more that we have hardened the boundaries of access to a middle class income, with rises in inequality and barriers to social change, the more that it has become necessary to police the poor, both with literal police and also linguistically, in order to cement those stratifications and preserve order.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:38 AM on November 10, 2014 [3 favorites]
The review of Jones' book above talks about the term as the latest in a long list of ways of distinguishing between compliant poor people and scary poor people, and this quote from the Vice article catches exactly that distinction.
The US doesn't have an exactly parallel term that I can think of, though there is definitely overlap with terms like "white trash" or "ghetto," perhaps partly because the racial makeup of each country is so different and so scary poor people get characterized differently.
There's never a reason to give a nasty name to the compliant poor people who aren't threatening and who play by the rules, because they are orderly and polite. The more that we have hardened the boundaries of access to a middle class income, with rises in inequality and barriers to social change, the more that it has become necessary to police the poor, both with literal police and also linguistically, in order to cement those stratifications and preserve order.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:38 AM on November 10, 2014 [3 favorites]
- I just think humans can be pretty sucky sometimes and want to feel better about his or her respective place on the ladder.
Kicking down furiously can provide the illusion of inching upwards.
posted by kewb at 6:45 AM on November 10, 2014 [24 favorites]
Kicking down furiously can provide the illusion of inching upwards.
posted by kewb at 6:45 AM on November 10, 2014 [24 favorites]
Kicking down furiously can provide the illusion of inching upwards
That's a good line, I'm going to steal it sometime. After reading this post, I read this recent one about race in the US, and the parallels (especially in part two) are unpleasant:
That's a good line, I'm going to steal it sometime. After reading this post, I read this recent one about race in the US, and the parallels (especially in part two) are unpleasant:
It reduced a portion of the people to the status of the negro slave, and gave the poor but now white people a precious and entitled inch to stand above the permanently enslaved on the social ladder. The next thing the politicians did sealed the deal: they paid poor whites a bounty for runaway slaves, and often made them overseers for slaves, turning every poor white in America into a prison guard against the people who had once been their neighbors and allies.posted by Ned G at 7:11 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
There are also parallels in the idea that gays in Russia are being used as the untouchable caste.
I'm reminded of the SF trope where sentient robots or modified animals take this role - I suppose it goes back at least to the Morlocks. It seems ingrained in our psyches, and one would hope that there'd be no need to remind ourselves how much cruelty and misery it perpetuates. One would hope...
posted by Devonian at 7:35 AM on November 10, 2014
I'm reminded of the SF trope where sentient robots or modified animals take this role - I suppose it goes back at least to the Morlocks. It seems ingrained in our psyches, and one would hope that there'd be no need to remind ourselves how much cruelty and misery it perpetuates. One would hope...
posted by Devonian at 7:35 AM on November 10, 2014
That isn’t to say he was right or wrong in doing so, only that the working class is much less united than Jones would like to believe. He has, no doubt, identified a real and horrible phenomenon with real and horrible political effects, but it is useful, in trying to explain that elusive ‘and how they get away with it’, to recognise that the working class is divided against itself.
There's something terribly condescending about this idea that the working class should be "united", when no other class is. Actual working-class people think the distinction between those who get drunk and violent and those who don't is pretty important. They regard violent asshole vs. not a violent asshole as a more important distinction than working class or middle class. It's only pearl-clutching rich people who avoid anyone "below" them" that think such a distinction is just false consciousness, because for such rich people. nothing a working-class person does has any importance.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 7:52 AM on November 10, 2014 [9 favorites]
There's something terribly condescending about this idea that the working class should be "united", when no other class is. Actual working-class people think the distinction between those who get drunk and violent and those who don't is pretty important. They regard violent asshole vs. not a violent asshole as a more important distinction than working class or middle class. It's only pearl-clutching rich people who avoid anyone "below" them" that think such a distinction is just false consciousness, because for such rich people. nothing a working-class person does has any importance.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 7:52 AM on November 10, 2014 [9 favorites]
The parallels in the USA might be white poor / black poor, perhaps?
Poor White (Wikipedia)
posted by Rash at 8:10 AM on November 10, 2014
Poor White (Wikipedia)
posted by Rash at 8:10 AM on November 10, 2014
Actual working-class people think the distinction between those who get drunk and violent and those who don't is pretty important. They regard violent asshole vs. not a violent asshole as a more important distinction than working class or middle class.
Yes.
I first heard the word "chav" (well, the variation "chaver") in the late 1990s when I was living in a pretty poor area of the North East (flats in my block sold for under £7,000). "Chav" was used by ordinary working class people to describe people *they* viewed as the underclass, and sometimes by that underclass to describe themselves. It was about cultural differences and behaviour, not income or genetics or class.
Middle-class people generally hadn't even heard the word at all. The idea that it was created as some sort of middle-class conspiracy to keep the working class down is silly Guardian journalist hand-wringing. When the people on your street who are setting fire to your shed, stealing your car, throwing bricks at you, etc seem to wear a uniform and hang around together it's natural to give the people wearing that uniform and behaving like that a name and dislike them. Not everyone wearing the uniform is going to be like that, but it's hard to remember that when you're afraid.
Of course once the media had picked up the concept it *did* get used as a smear against the working class and poor people, often unintentionally by well meaning journalists who couldn't tell the difference between a subculture and working class people (or low income people) in general.
posted by BinaryApe at 8:27 AM on November 10, 2014 [10 favorites]
Yes.
I first heard the word "chav" (well, the variation "chaver") in the late 1990s when I was living in a pretty poor area of the North East (flats in my block sold for under £7,000). "Chav" was used by ordinary working class people to describe people *they* viewed as the underclass, and sometimes by that underclass to describe themselves. It was about cultural differences and behaviour, not income or genetics or class.
Middle-class people generally hadn't even heard the word at all. The idea that it was created as some sort of middle-class conspiracy to keep the working class down is silly Guardian journalist hand-wringing. When the people on your street who are setting fire to your shed, stealing your car, throwing bricks at you, etc seem to wear a uniform and hang around together it's natural to give the people wearing that uniform and behaving like that a name and dislike them. Not everyone wearing the uniform is going to be like that, but it's hard to remember that when you're afraid.
Of course once the media had picked up the concept it *did* get used as a smear against the working class and poor people, often unintentionally by well meaning journalists who couldn't tell the difference between a subculture and working class people (or low income people) in general.
posted by BinaryApe at 8:27 AM on November 10, 2014 [10 favorites]
Ooh, maybe we can do bogan next.
posted by koeselitz at 8:48 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by koeselitz at 8:48 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
In the US slurs referencing working class types are spoken under the breath, rather than on the news.
posted by Oyéah at 9:13 AM on November 10, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 9:13 AM on November 10, 2014 [2 favorites]
"Chav" was used by ordinary working class people to describe people *they* viewed as the underclass, and sometimes by that underclass to describe themselves. It was about cultural differences and behaviour, not income or genetics or class.
"It was about distinguishing yourself from/as the underclass, not class."
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 11:16 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
"It was about distinguishing yourself from/as the underclass, not class."
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 11:16 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]
In the US slurs referencing working class types are spoken under the breath, rather than on the news.
What are some examples? I am struggling to think of some beyond I guess redneck?
posted by cell divide at 11:22 AM on November 10, 2014
What are some examples? I am struggling to think of some beyond I guess redneck?
posted by cell divide at 11:22 AM on November 10, 2014
When I was growing up on a Bradford council estate in the earay 80s I too regularly heard the word 'charver'. My nephews dad jokingly calls his lad it all the time.
It was, to some degree, both affectionate and a mark of distinction. Since then much of the social housing is in private hands. Often the same people through right to buy, and sometimes through a modern version of slum clearance.
When I hear that word now it is laced with hate. These are the fuckers that give us a bad name kind of hate. There are very definitely two estates now, and hate almost feels like an understatement.
posted by vbfg at 12:34 PM on November 10, 2014
It was, to some degree, both affectionate and a mark of distinction. Since then much of the social housing is in private hands. Often the same people through right to buy, and sometimes through a modern version of slum clearance.
When I hear that word now it is laced with hate. These are the fuckers that give us a bad name kind of hate. There are very definitely two estates now, and hate almost feels like an understatement.
posted by vbfg at 12:34 PM on November 10, 2014
What are some examples? I am struggling to think of some beyond I guess redneck?
America likes to break it down by race, too, but there are lots for the latin/mexican working/migrant class that are pretty explicitly connected to their role as low-paid labor.
"Poor Whites" have already been addressed.
posted by atoxyl at 4:37 PM on November 10, 2014
America likes to break it down by race, too, but there are lots for the latin/mexican working/migrant class that are pretty explicitly connected to their role as low-paid labor.
"Poor Whites" have already been addressed.
posted by atoxyl at 4:37 PM on November 10, 2014
There's something terribly condescending about this idea that the working class should be "united", when no other class is. Actual working-class people think the distinction between those who get drunk and violent and those who don't is pretty important. They regard violent asshole vs. not a violent asshole as a more important distinction than working class or middle class. It's only pearl-clutching rich people who avoid anyone "below" them" that think such a distinction is just false consciousness, because for such rich people. nothing a working-class person does has any importance.
In fairness, when the "unity" argument is made, it's made by employing the assumption that most of the other classes are broadly united in the sense that they preserve their class interests first and foremost, and that their divisions are largely superficial compared to the de facto result of effective class solidarity. That is, the argument is that you don't often see the middle class or the upper class going out of their way to deny social privileges or status to other people of their socioeconomic status, and when you do see it it tends to be a rather marginal and ineffectual phenomenon with little political weight behind it. If a middle-class person's neighbor is a destructive asshole, they don't necessarily blame said neighbor for the shrinking of the middle class.
I tend to think the "effective solidarity hypothesis" is especially true of the upper classes, who, for all their apparent disagreements on politics, tend to act first and foremost to make sure they all stay upper-class. It's also why a politician can run on a platform of "preserving and expanding the middle class" without a bunch of people saying, "Ok, but only this kind of middle class person" in response. Yes,t here's gatekeeping when it comes to forms of upward mobility...but that's about keeping out the lower class, not about shrinking or dividing the existing middle class.
But the middle and upper classes benefit from dividing the working class up, and therefore there are both internal and external pressures that cause working-class division and contribute to the sense that working-class people are more deeply divided than middle- and upper-class people. It's not so much that lower-class people are inherently less together or more apart than any other class, it's that it's much easier to divide people who lack political and economic power in general.
If you are poor, but you can be convinced that something other than or in addition to poverty is part of your essential condition, then fighting conditions that create poverty becomes less of a singular focus by default. Or rather, you start to blame your poverty less on what the middle and upper classes do with the economy and the government and more on the assholes down the street who burned your shed or smashed your car windows. When middle-class people start to do badly or upper-class people become less rich, they blame the government or the economy or lower-class immigrants and are encouraged to do so by politicians and the media; when the lower classes have an even harder time, they're encouraged to blame other lower-class people or treat poverty as a problem caused by the poor who are different than themselves.
In this argument the assholes down the street are making your daily life bad, but they're a symptom, not the whole disease.
posted by kewb at 3:58 AM on November 11, 2014 [2 favorites]
In fairness, when the "unity" argument is made, it's made by employing the assumption that most of the other classes are broadly united in the sense that they preserve their class interests first and foremost, and that their divisions are largely superficial compared to the de facto result of effective class solidarity. That is, the argument is that you don't often see the middle class or the upper class going out of their way to deny social privileges or status to other people of their socioeconomic status, and when you do see it it tends to be a rather marginal and ineffectual phenomenon with little political weight behind it. If a middle-class person's neighbor is a destructive asshole, they don't necessarily blame said neighbor for the shrinking of the middle class.
I tend to think the "effective solidarity hypothesis" is especially true of the upper classes, who, for all their apparent disagreements on politics, tend to act first and foremost to make sure they all stay upper-class. It's also why a politician can run on a platform of "preserving and expanding the middle class" without a bunch of people saying, "Ok, but only this kind of middle class person" in response. Yes,t here's gatekeeping when it comes to forms of upward mobility...but that's about keeping out the lower class, not about shrinking or dividing the existing middle class.
But the middle and upper classes benefit from dividing the working class up, and therefore there are both internal and external pressures that cause working-class division and contribute to the sense that working-class people are more deeply divided than middle- and upper-class people. It's not so much that lower-class people are inherently less together or more apart than any other class, it's that it's much easier to divide people who lack political and economic power in general.
If you are poor, but you can be convinced that something other than or in addition to poverty is part of your essential condition, then fighting conditions that create poverty becomes less of a singular focus by default. Or rather, you start to blame your poverty less on what the middle and upper classes do with the economy and the government and more on the assholes down the street who burned your shed or smashed your car windows. When middle-class people start to do badly or upper-class people become less rich, they blame the government or the economy or lower-class immigrants and are encouraged to do so by politicians and the media; when the lower classes have an even harder time, they're encouraged to blame other lower-class people or treat poverty as a problem caused by the poor who are different than themselves.
In this argument the assholes down the street are making your daily life bad, but they're a symptom, not the whole disease.
posted by kewb at 3:58 AM on November 11, 2014 [2 favorites]
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