Pikey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pikey is a pejorative slang term used primarily in England, originally referring to Travellers, sometimes mistakenly called "Gypsies". The Oxford English Dictionary traced its use in 1837 by Times, “referring to strangers harvesting in the Isle of Sheppey island”. Later that century it meant a "turnpike traveller" or vagabond. Recently, its use was associated with Irish Travellers and non-Roma Gypsies.[1][2] In the late 20th century, it came to be used to describe, with disdain, a class of people regardless of heritage or abode, who are “squalid, disreputable, vulgar”(OED), untrustworthy and thought of as being one of the lowest classes in society.[3]
Contemporary usage
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(home).
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 in which it is on.[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.
A well known example of the word's use in popular culture is on the television show, The Catherine Tate Show, where Catherine Tate playing a cheeky schoolgirl named Lauren often uses phrases such as "Are you callin' me a pikey?" to suggest that others are 'disrespecting' her.
