...is offensive to working class people?
Sorted by the ‘students laughing at the working classes’ thread.
My Mum is proper working class. Grew up in extreme poverty in a big industrial city. She left school at 15, got a job. Says ‘breakfast, dinner and tea’ and ‘toilet’, would say ‘serviette’ and ‘living room’.
She uses the word chav to mean a certain type of person, someone of low intelligence and education, who has poor taste and does not conduct themselves with dignities. She would never, in a million years, associate it with being working class.
For example, she would call Katie Price a ‘chav’, because of the way she dresses, what she’s called her kids etc, despite the fact that Katie Price is a millionaire who was raised middle class, riding horses.
She would never call someone a chav who was a normal working class person, e.g a single mum in jeans and a tshirt who works as a cleaner, a bus driver, a bin man etc.
It annoys me when people chime in on threads with ‘how dare you use chav, it’s very classist and offensive towards the working class.’ While I understand it’s not a nice thing to say, not all working class people are stood about smoking in tracksuits! My understanding is it is a taste based insult, not a class based one like pleb.
AIBU over this? It’s not a word I fling around willy billy by any means, and I can see that it’s not a nice thing to call someone, but why the hell does it now mean all working class people?!
Am I