By MICHAEL FERBER, Speaking of Words
For hundreds of years we English speakers have come up with countless terms of abuse for each other—one of the more fertile sectors of the language—and a surprising number of them are based on urban scorn for rural folk. City dwellers see people from the country as stupid, clumsy, or downright evil, and they extend their terms for them to anyone, no matter where they come from.
A good example is boor. Boor originally meant “peasant” or “countryman.” Samuel Johnson in 1771 contrasted “The cits of London, and the boors of Middlesex.” But even by Johnson’s day it had gathered the negative connotations of ignorance and discourtesy, and now these prevail in its meaning. The word come from Dutch boer (“farmer, peasant”), a word we know from its Afrikaans descendent, one of those the British fought in the Boer War (1899-1902).
A much older word is churl, which goes as far back as we can see in Old English. It meant simply “male human being, a man, a husband,” with no pejorative sense. After the Norman Conquest it came to mean “a tenant in pure villeinage, a serf, a bondman.” We’ll return to villeinage. The falling social rank of churl was all that was needed to make it a term of abuse. But its original neutral sense is evident in the names Karl, Carol, and (via French) Charles.
Footnote: The constellation Big Dipper (part of Ursa Major) is still sometimes called “Charles’ Wain.” This has puzzled many star-gazers, but it seems it was a mistake for “Churl’s Wain,” the man’s wagon, as opposed to the smaller woman’s wagon, Ursa Minor.
A villain today is more likely to be a sophisticated scoundrel, with no connection to the countryside, but it derives from villein, “one of the class of serfs in the feudal system, specifically a peasant occupier or cultivator entirely subject to a lord,” according to the OED. The lord probably lived in a villa, while the villeins lived in a village, from Latin villaticum, “pertaining to a villa.”
In the sixteenth century a clown meant a “peasant, farmer, or country bumpkin.” An etiquette handbook of 1646 for young men advises, “Put not thy meat in thy mouth, holding thy knife in thy hands, as do the Country clowns.” There is certainly a condescending sneer here, but the poet Keats almost two centuries later, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” used the word without sneering, as he imagined the bird “was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown,” that is, by everyone. It had already come to mean “fool or jester” in a court, and then later the funny circus performer we know. When Republican Senator Mark Kirk called Donald Trump a “malignant clown” in 2016 he may have meant someone more boorish than funny.
There was a theory that clown derives from Latin colonus, meaning “farmer,” but that has problems; more probable is that, like boor, it comes from Dutch: kloen meant “uncouth person, lout, fool” (attested in 1624), while kleun meant “peasant, country bumpkin” (1628). If its negative edge came with it into English, then Keats’s usage is generous, as we might expect.
Pagan is not mainly an insulting term today, but when Christianity was more powerful it could be worse than an insult; it could be a death threat. It comes from the Latin adjective paganus, which meant “rustic, or of the country,” from pagus, “village, or country district.” It seems the Christians, at first mainly city dwellers, noted that ancient polytheistic beliefs persisted in the countryside. Peasant, by the way, goes back via Old French to Latin pagus. Modern French pays means “country.”
A word that can translate paganus is heathen, which derives from the same root as heath and heather. It is still used occasionally as a playful insult for someone who is ignorant or unsophisticated.
About the most extreme insult you can fling at someone is cretin. It has nothing to do with Crete, but derives from the French word crétin (around 1750), which refers to a person with congenital iodine deficiency. The main theory for its origin, though it is disputed, traces it to chrétien, meaning “Christian.” If this is true, the story reverses the plot of pagan and heathen, for the assumption is that country people were called “Christians” because they were simple, pious folk, as opposed to the not-very-Christian sophisticates of the city.
These same simple Christian folk were once called silly, starting around 1450, when that word meant “good,” even “pious” or “blessed” (as its German cousin selig can still mean). A text from 1559 tells us “the silly nuns did yield them hostelry.” The term then came to mean “innocent” and “defenseless,” then “simple-minded, ignorant, uncultivated,” from the point of view, of course, of the complicated, educated, cultivated citizens.
I will round out this list with a few positive urban terms that imply a rustic negative. An urbane person is polite or refined in manners, but the oldest sense of urbane is, well, urban, “having to do with city life,” from the Latin word for “city,” urbs. Such a person is both civil and civilized, words derived from Latin civilis, “having to do with citizens,” from civis, “citizen.” (City and citizen have the same source.) Such a person is courteous too, or shows courtesy, both words originally referring to the behavior of the nobility at a court: courtesy was courtliness. The German word for “courteous,” höflich, also goes back to Hof, “court.”
So our very language seems stacked against rural people. But of course “our” language, at least the one I am writing in, is a dialect of American English that is heavily influenced by educated people, by books and dictionaries, and by certain rules of grammar and preferences of style or tone. And of course we have many more records of urban speech than of rural speech. Rural speech, here and in Britain, Canada, and Australia, must have lots of abusive terms for an urbanite, starting with city slicker. Dude used to be such a term, more or less equivalent to dandy, but for decades now, thanks at first to the California surfer dialect, it has been adopted widely to mean “guy” or even “girl.” There must be many more that I simply don’t know, because I am mainly a city person who has been over-educated at fancy universities.
They say history is written by the victors. But the point here is that history is written, period, and writing has always been mainly a city thing.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.