An article in the British Daily Mail newspaper, a book by the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary has declared 'Chav' to be the word of the year for 2004.

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Chav was a word coined to describe the spread of the ill-mannered underclass - a rival to the American trailer trash - which loves shellsuits, bling-bling jewellery and designer wear, especially the ubiquitous Burberry baseball cap.

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Remember this is a British book; presumably Americans have a different buzzword as their word of the year; any nominations?

Also of great interest is the list given of 100 "words of the century", showing the top buzzwords of each year since 1904. Remember again that this is a British list!

What surprised me was how early some of the words entered the language; for example, "hip" is listed for 1904, "celeb" for 1913, and "pop" for 1921.

Any origin or etymology for chav you know of?

FROM THE LIST:
"1929 sex"

What was it called before '29?

Yes, jheem, I wondered the etymology, too. When a new word comes out, is it always called being "coined?" In other words, is every word "coined," so to speak? Or are there criteria for coined words, versus just new words?

I hadn't heard of "larper" or "shroomer," either. Now, they talk about "schtupid" and "sctreet." I have always called my husband "schweetz."

CW, I think it is funny that "sex" was the word in 1929, and it wasn't until 1956 that "sexy" was the word of the year.

I don't know about you, but I wanna be able to vote for the word of the year!!!

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Originally posted by Caterwauller:
FROM THE LIST:
"1929 sex"

What was it called before '29?

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My parents had a number of anthologies of cartoons and humor that covered 1900-1950. I remember one of the humor pieces from about 1933 described a cocktail party conversation in which every subject was eventually brought around to sex: "I heard the City Zoo got a new gorilla" "Did you know gorillas have an unusually late puberty?" That sort of thing. Perhaps the influence of Freud, the Bloomsbury group, and the roaring twenties had trickled down to mainstream media enough that people who had never sex talked about in public before now felt like they were hearing about it constantly.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: neveu,

but I wanna be able to vote for the word of the year!!!

Yeah, sure. Like we vote for the Times magazine Man of the Year.

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Originally posted by jheem:
Any origin or etymology for chav you know of?

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According to the article I cited:

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The word Chav is almost certainly from the old Romany word for a child, chavi. But it was reborn last year to describe certain natives of Chatham in Kent.

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See also the ChavScum site, but note that they have been suffering bandwidth problems because of the recent publicity, so the site may be inaccessible or slow over the next few days.

the old Romany word for a child, chavi.

Ah, blame it on the Tinkers. Ta, arnie. Now, I wonder what the etymology of chavi is?

It surprises me slightly that "9/11" is given as word of the year for 2001. I can't remember that shorthand for the atrocity being used until some months afterwards, when it would have been 2002. It obviously would have been used earlier in the US; after all, it uses the American date order -- here it would be "11/9" -- but as I said before, this is a British list.

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Originally posted by Caterwauller:

What was it called before '29?

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They never mentioned it at all before then!

9/11

I've also heard two pronuciations: nine-one-one and nine-eleven. The former is also how 911, the US telephone emergency number is pronounced

From Shakespeare:

Celia: You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate: we must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest. [As You Like It, Act IV sc. i]

Most of Shakespeare's uses of the word sex have the meaning of our word gender. I suppose the act of sex would've been referred to as swiving, if he'd used that word. The first instance of swive's cousin, the f-word, in print was in John Florio's bilingual Italian-English dictionary which was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I.

See the online concordance of Shakespeare. Great fun!

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Most of Shakespeare's uses of the word sex have the meaning of our word gender

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Indeed. In fact, gender was a word used by linguists that was pressed into service by puritan types to try to avoid the 'unpleasant' connotations of the word sex.

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Originally posted by Caterwauller:
FROM THE LIST:
"1929 sex"

What was it called before '29?

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Either of the two divisions of organic beings distinguished as male and female respectively; the males or the females (of a species, etc., esp. of the human race) viewed collectively.

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That's the first definition of sex in the OED Online. The earliest supporting citation is from 1382. The first citation of sex, meaning "sexual intercourse," is from 1929.

It's always fun to read the dictionary. There are so many different definitions than I thought there were, one word leads to another, and, before I know it, hours have passed. I learned that sex is an obsolete form of six. Of course, we still use it in that sense as a prefix. "The sex" meant the female sex (quotes from 1589 to 1920). The "third sex" referred to eunuchs (1820) or to homosexuals as a group (1897 to 1977). It was also used sarcastically in 1873: "Sydney Smith..often spoke with much bitterness of the growing belief in three Sexes of Humanity--Men, Women, and Clergymen." And it has been used as a slang term for genetalia or penis.

As for gender ...

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In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes. Freq. attrib.

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The first citation is from 1963.

I can see its use in a social or cultural context, but it is too often misused in a biological sense. Here's what the AHD says:

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Usage Note: Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter,” but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined. This distinction is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels.

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Tinman

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Well that is interesting! I have been using genderfor socialogical references, and sex for biological references for quite some time now.

I believe the reason that gender has come to be used euphemistically in place of sex, (cf. my Shakespeare quotation above), is because we have a gender system (in Indo-European languages) that has three genders that seem to map pretty closely to biological sex. Some language families (like the Bantu) have upwards of 13 or more grammatical genders that include categories like round things or long things or deities and men, etc. Also, it is not clear the the tripartite (masculine, feminine, neuter) system developed from one that had anything to do with biological sex. Seems that Proto-Indo-European had a bipartite system (animate and inanimate): animate went to masculine and inanimate went to neuter, and the feminine developed out of a original plural for inanimates. There's an extensive literature on grammatical gender in language stretching back at least to Humboldt (in the early 19th century).

This message has been edited. Last edited by: jheem,

I'm really lost on chav since I've never heard of it and don't know what shell-suits or bling-bling are.

Pop: I was surprised to learn recently that the Boston Pops got that name much earlier than I'd thought (1900).

f-word: I thought the first printed occurrence was in Dunbar's The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (1508): "wan fukkit funling". Of course this was technically in Scots so you could say it wasn't in English, though I claim it as such.

Aput,

Are you by any chance a High Court judge?

The shell suit was particularly popular in the 1980s, especially for some reason in Liverpool. It is a variation on the track suit. For more, see this page.

Bling-bling was a word coined by a rapper to describe the style that consists of wearing large, flashy jewellery items. See 'Bling Bling' Added To Oxford English Dictionary.

Now you can ask, "What is a track suit?" and "What is a rapper?"

The article arnie cited to open this thread says that chav means what we in the US would call trailer trash. The Scotsman adds that the Scottish equivalent is ned.

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arnie: What surprised me was how early some of the words entered the language; for example, "hip" is listed for 1904, "celeb" for 1913, and "pop" for 1921.
kalleh: CW, I think it is funny that "sex" was the word in 1929, and it wasn't until 1956 that "sexy" was the word of the year.

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Heck, according The Scotsman's article, sexy wasn't even in the language, let alone word-of-the-year, until 1956. Which strikes me as weird.

Which strikes me as weird.

Me too!

BTW, does anyone know anything about that Popbitch Web site? I went there, but you have to register (free, it says), and I was reluctant.

Which strikes me as weird.

Why? It strikes me as perfectly normal for the societies and times under discussion.