could this word also mean something like “harmful powerty” ?
Not as a noun, no. As an adjective next to “poverty”, it can. “Poverty that grinds you down and wears you out.”
On the other hand, what poverty is not harmful?
thanks
the word it taken from a book about political science
Would you consider “working nigh and day to feed you family” as being in grinding poverty or just tough luck and having a way to keep body and soul togehter?
Plop Teddy K. down in the most destitute place on earth and he would immediateley call Wash. D. C. on his cell phone to send them some “aid.”
Pick up a skinny, pot bellied urchis off the mud street and plop him down behind a fast food establishment and he say “Hey fellas there’s plenty to eat for our whole village is this big green metal box here.”
“One man’s poverty is another man’s plenty.” And vice versa!
It’s all in your past experience and point of view.
Give us a little context to work with. At the very least, the sentence in which it is used. The whole paragraph would be even better.
Yes, I’d like to see some context too. For what it’s worth, I’m familiar with grind in the following relevant contexts:
Grind joint: A crooked gambling establishment or game that is designed to grind one’s bankroll down, over time. You won’t lose it in a hurry, but you will lose it eventually. And for certain.
Grinder: Con man who is running a game or establishment described above.
By extension, it would seem that the little context we do know (I’m assuming, “grinding poverty”) means “an constant inability to pay one’s expenses from one’s earnings, so savings must be eaten into to the point where they run out so they cannot cover the bills either.” IOW, you cannot pay your tabs, and any savings etc. are being eaten by each month’s bill payments.
Note that I am not suggesting that your context has anything to do with gambling or con games. But I hear “grind” and anything to do with money in the same sentence, and I assume a con of some kind. Certainly, some context would help pin it down.
The phrase “grinding poverty” has become kinda cliched. I always thought of it as particularly unpleasant, debilitating poverty, which wears the poor individual down through lack of resources and constant, all-consuming worries about where the next meal is coming from.
I didn’t know about the ‘con’ end of things, Spoons. I just thought of a piece of steel, clamped in a vise, being ground down by the relentless pressure of a wheel above.
For grinding poverty, I start by thinking of of the kind of situation you allude to: a continuing gap between bills and incoming money, with the inability to create a pad of savings because there’s always some bill crying to be paid, and the only borrowing sources demand more and more extra as payment, in a negative cycle.
But mere cash-flow problems aren’t sufficient for poverty. It’s quite possible to have cash-flow problems and appear prosperous. At first.
If your cash-flow problems continue, however, you start missing oppurtunities. You can’t buy that great used monitor or car or tool at half-price (let alone a new one), or take that college course, because you just don’t have the spare funds on hand, even if enough money passes through your hands each month.
You start to borrow money, but always you have to pay it back with some extra.
If you have cash-flow problems for too long, your infrastructure starts to suffer. Your clothes beciome threadbare because you can’t replace them often. And because your single pair of pants is getting use every day, they wear out more quickly. And you go around in wrinkly clothes because you can’t wash them every night.
You guard your one pair of shoes and dread their wearing out because you can’t replace them easily. Your stereo beaks abnd you can’t replace it, so you go without music in your apartment. You can’t perform maintenance on your computer that would stave off problems, so you view the internet through a monitor that flickers and is slowly dying. And always, always, you are worrying about money and how the next bill will be paid.
If it goes on long enough, you become drawn and tense. The constant worry obscures the joys of life, like spring sunshine and the smiles of women. You start to feel worse and worse about yourself, and that robs you of energy. You eat worse, and that robs you of energy too.
Eventually you drop one of the bills you are juggling and the rent cheque bounces, or the phone bill, or the car insurance. There will be NSF fees and late fees and rate increases: more money to pay, when you can least afford it.
Your situation worsens. You become less able to get to your job. Your housing situation becomes precarious. You start wondering what assets you have that you can sell in a hurry. And still your debt clutches you, pulling you down with its heavy grey stone hands.
That’s what we mean by ‘grinding’, WildfireMM**. Not the absolute level of poverty, but the pressure and whether you are going up in the world or being pulled down.
I think maybe Charles Dickens works describe grinding poverty best
It’s also used in poker. A grinder is someone who plays conservatively and is good enough to make a solid consistent living. They may not consider themselves a gambler, they are there to put in their hours and get their pay. They grind away at the competition slowly getting ahead of the game.
A grind house is also a rundown movie theatre that shows mostly low budget and/or exploitation films.