I didn’t want to hijack the thread, but it’s the first time I ever came across the expression “Double-wide”. It’s easy to google it but less easy to get at what precisely is meant here. For my fellow non-Americans, it’s a large (uh, double wide?) mobile home on a trailer park, I believe. And I think the point being made here is that someone living in a double wide thinks they are doing pretty well for themselves - but in reality, of course, they’re still just living on a trailer park. So - something to do with unrealistic, unjustified pride, and overestimating self worth?
Am I close? Or am I reading way too much into it? And if I am close, is this a common use of the expression, or a neat new coinage? Oh, and any similar expressions I should be looking out for?
It’s a cheap home. A trailer that has had its wheels removed. The owner likely doesn’t even own the land it’s on. It’s a shorthand reference to a lower class person.
People with double-wides don’t tend to be packed into trailer parks but have them as individual home on their own plots of land. And can run up to $200,000 or more after financing. And have vastly more living space than a city apartment. So, usually what the smear means is that the labeler is a snob and a bigot.
The reason they are called double wides is because a single wide is standard – it’s the legal width to move on a highway. Double wides are made in halves, so each is moved to its final location separately, and then they get fastened together to make a complete house.
There are upscale ones, sure, but the term denotes a rural person who has few space or zoning constraints, who grades out a pad and buys the cheapest quickest possible reasonable-sized home. It 's shorthand for a certain type of rural culture.
BTW, what the “double-wide” part means is that the segments of the house are built off-site and trucked to the final location (and therefore have to fit on US roads). A single-wide" is sized to move in one section, double-wides need two modules, and triple-wides need three.
Yeah, I’ve usually heard it as a sort of mocking comment intended to put down people who live in them. Basically the idea is that mobile homes of any stripe are inherently inferior to site-built homes, and by extension so are the people who live in them.
The mockery is usually along the lines that someone is so white trash that they bought a bigger pile of crap rather than moving into a ‘real’ house (i.e. site-built).
Having worked for a mobile home company for a few months, I can say that the company definitely aimed at being a value option for people in the market for a home, especially in rural areas. From what I gathered, it was one of those things where it apparently wasn’t uncommon for people to inherit or otherwise have a parcel of land, but not be able to afford to have a builder come out and build a house on it, but they could afford a mobile home of some kind to be built and transported to it.
As noted otherwise, a double-wide is a type of mobile home. It’s twice as wide as a standard, hence roomier. As a category, mobile homes are almost always coded as rural and lower status (because their occupants almost always are).
Double wides specifically are the top of that class, so they’re an ironic stand-in for “top of the bottom” as relates to social status.
source: grew up in a double-wide in a trailer park for part of my life.
One source of confusion is that in some parts of the US, “trailer” is used to refer to a mobile home (has its own wheels, like a bus) that can be moved around and parked in different places, while in others, it means a manufactured home that can be put onto a truck and moved elsewhere (maybe a couple of times). The term “double-wide” would refer to the 2-piece house-like option, not the bus-like option.
We own a double-wide.
It’s quite nice. 1800 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths. The construction isn’t as good as our primary home, but we didn’t have any worries buying it when we were looking for a “Summer” house.
Thanks guys! Feels like I was fairly close in my understanding then.
(I should add that this thread is in no way intended as a knock on @LSLGuy - I hope he will pass by and add to the discussion).
I get the feeling that the term (used to identify a rural - and hence typically right-leaning? - type) is reasonably well known/understood; but that it’s not a commonplace expression - correct?
Specifically regarding the idea of (this use of) double-wide connoting the overestimation of self worth - was that correct? (Almost along the lines of the character in the song “Yankee Doodle”).
j
ETA - and I’m not having a dig at @beowulff either!
My parents lived in a doublewide for a few years, and it was nice. On the inside, you’d almost never know you were in a trailer.
A tornado siren would remind you.
My mom lived in one for a period of time. As stated, it was nice on the inside. The biggest difference, it seemed to me, were the walls: they weren’t made of sturdier materials like brick, but instead were lighter/flimsier.
It’s a fairly rural area about 20 miles West of Flagstaff, AZ.
It is on “open range,” so herds of cows come by periodically and eat the weeds. We don’t have grass, so we get lots of pretty wildflowers in the warm months.
It’s right across I-40 from the IKRC, which is why we bought it.
Well, I got me a double-wide