There have been a few threads about the chav phenomenon, mostly started by bemused foreigners, but I haven’t seen much discussion about how the word rose to prominence.
I remember being quite surprised when the media grabbed hold of it a few years ago, as I hadn’t heard it for a while and the meaning seemed to have shifted subtlely in the meantime.
When I was at school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we used the word “chav” as a kind of general-purpose insult for anyone or anything that looked poor. If someone had an old and unfashionable school bag, or supermarket-brand trainers, they might be called a chav, and the objects themselves would be described as “chavvy”.
C&A, that chain of clothes shops loved by parents for its cheap prices (but not high in the fashion stakes), was referred to as “Chavs & Ackers” (“acker” being an alternative term for what we called a chav).
“Pikey” was a similar word, but tended to be used more specifically for gypsies or travellers, but if you were a pikey you were likely also a chav. Again it was used as a general insult for someone who looked poor or unfashionable, both as a noun and as an adjective (“That jacket’s a bit pikey.”)
As far as I can remember, “chav” really wasn’t used to describe any style that people would choose to wear, like it is today – you would have been more likely to be called a chav if your mum bought your clothes for you.
Does anyone else remember the term being used in this way before it “took off”? I’d have first heard it in probably the mid- to late 1980s, this was in Hampshire.
I don’t know much about chavs but from the pictures I have seen, they are the goofiest bunch of hoodlums that I have ever seen. I just want to fly a bunch of them over to somewhere like Compton, California and let them walk around and then witness the carnage.
You misunderstand. They are not meant to be “hoodlums”. They’re just suburban kids who dress funny, they’re not trying to make out they’re gangsters or anything.
Often heard, never used. I have a serious dislike for that word, and particularly for its use as a verb synonymous with steal. The latter’s one in common currency with kids, and on numerous occasions I’ve (gently) challenged them over it, because often they’re oblivious to its origins and of its potential to offend.
(Am I hypocritical to not object to ‘chav’? Maybe. I thought it had been fully divorced from its Romany origins, but the OP indicates otherwise.)
Around 2002 my kids started at secondary school and one of the groups at the school (I wouldn’t dignify them with the title “gangs”) was referred to as “Townies”. The Townies had all the characteristics now associated with Chavs - Burrberry, baseball caps, shell suits, none too bright, etc, - and it was soon after this I became aware of the media talking about Chavs and realised they were the same. This ties up with Little Britain starting on TV (Feb 2003) with Vicky Pollard The kids soon started using Chav and dropped Townie.
Yes, “townie” was the first word I heard to describe what are now call “chavs”. I don’t think I heard the word until I went to university (Sheffield) in 1994, though, as we don’t really have townies where I grew up.
I find it odd that kids round here were using the word “chav”, with a rather different meaning from its current one, 15 years or more before it suddenly took on a new life. I wonder if it will turn up on Balderdash & Piffle.
The earliest usage in its current sense that I can find on Google Groups is from 1998 here, but there’s a mention from 1996 of the verb usage of “chav” meaning “to steal” - which reminds me that we also used it that way when I was at school (circa 1990), as in “Who’s chavved my pencil case?”. A local variant on this use was “chaw”, but I’m not sure if that’s how you spell that as it was only ever used in speech!
Weirdly, that phrase has set memory bells ringing. Maybe I had my pencil case stolen a lot (which would explain never having one), but seeing it spelled out like that, I wonder if I did hear it more often but it never registered.
Odd - I was at school in the late eighties/early nineties, in Hampshire too, and I never heard either word. We might have used ‘Towny’ and I heard reference to ‘gyppos’, but didn’t hear ‘chav’ until the millennium at the earliest, and hadn’t heard ‘pikey’ until it was over-used in the film ‘Snatch’.
It really pissed me off to hear youngsters throwing the word ‘pikey’ around so much after that film came out.
Early 2000s here, too. We used “pikey” to mean gypsies for a long time before that though. I guess before “chav” become widespread, we called them “scallies”.
The kids soon started using Chav and dropped Townie.