Scrubbers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term 'scrubber' is a word that arose largely in the North of England in the 80s/90s, (although it still enjoys some currency today) to refer to a certain type of person, either believed to be a member of a social demographic which the speaker terms 'scrubbers', or to personify 'scrubberish-ness' or 'scrubber-dom.' Certain sources (not referenced because of profanity) associate the concept with Stoke-on-Trent, in Staffordshire, England, from where it became widespread. Originally the word referred to a female thought of as having 'loose morals' and being of an offensive or abrasive bearing, but soon came to be used as a pejorative term for a person of either sex who is perceived as satisfying some or all of the following criteria:
-Associated with urban areas, or, in paradigm cases, a conscious aficionado of 'the urban life'.
-Generally poorly educated and of a crude or coarse manner.
-Possessing a propensity to display abusive behaviour towards people or things that the subject believes to be representative of a different lifestyle/social demarcation to theirs.
-Generally exclusively wearing and prizing sporting clothing, or garments manufactured and branded by sports clothes companies.
-Often wearing large, garish (in the eyes of the accuser) items of metallic jewellery.
'Scrubber' is sometimes thought to be almost exactly synonymous with terms like 'scally', 'chav', 'minger', 'slapper', 'townie', and so on, but it is probably more accurate to say that the word provides a way of denoting this group as a collective, ie; 'scallies' and 'chavs' are members of the set 'scrubbers'.
Scrubbers in popular culture.
The Little Britain character 'Vicky Pollard' is sometimes thought of as the pre-eminent representative, on television, of 'chavs', 'slappers', 'scrubbers' etc.
In the film Withnail & I, Richard E. Grant's character 'Withnail' appears to express the opinion that 'scrubbers' embrace the label, leaning out of a car window while driving through London and yelling at some passers by, 'SCRUBBERS!!! SCRUBBERS!!!' before remarking 'they love it.'
