Pikey is a pejorative slang term used mainly in the United Kingdom[1][2] to refer to Irish Travellers, gypsies or people of low social class. Pikey is also sometimes called a piker in the United States,[3] but a piker in Australia and New Zealand means someone who refuses to do something within a group.[4]
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The term pikey as a pejorative appears to be a very old English word, remaining near unchanged, probably in common use during William Shakespeare's lifetime. The text Gypsy Politics and Social Change notes Boorde's 1547 reference:
Egipcions be swarte and doth go disgsy'd in theyr apparel, contrary to other nacyons: they be lyght fyngered, and use pyking.[5]
Gypsies are swarthy and go disguised in their apparel, contrary to other nations: they are light-fingered and use piking.
The term is strongly associated with itinerant life and constant travel: pikey is directly derived from pike which, circa 1520, meant to "go away from, to go on" and related to the words turnpike (toll-road) and pike-man (toll-collector) [6]
Charles Dickens in 1837 writes disparagingly of itinerant pike-keepers[6]
The Oxford English Dictionary traced the earliest use of "pikey" to The Times in August 1838, which referred to strangers who had come to the Isle of Sheppey as "pikey-men".[7] In 1847, J. O. Halliwell in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words recorded the use of "pikey" to mean a gypsy.[7] In 1887, W. D. Parish and W. F. Shaw in the Dictionary of Kentish Dialect recorded the use of the word to mean "a turnpike traveller; a vagabond; and so generally a low fellow".[7]
Thomas Acton's Gypsy Politics and Social Change notes John Camden Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1887) as similarly stating:
Hotten's dictionary of slang gives pike at as go away and Pikey as a tramp or a Gypsy. He continues a pikey-cart is, in various parts of the country, one of those habitable vehicles suggestive of country life. Possibly the term has some reference to those who continually use the pike or turnpike road.[8]
The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society similarly agrees the term pikey solely applied (negatively) to Gypsies[9][10]
The connotation and linkage of gypsies to petty theft, crime and general low socioeconomic activities is well-entrenched, as the text Understanding Representation states:
"Pikey is one of the negative words associated with gypsies: people who fight and steal equals 'pikeys'. It includes fortune-tellers such as the famous Gypsy Rose Lee..."[11]
In 1937, then-Senator Harry S Truman compared the financiers of the 1930s, whom he called "pikers",[3] to bank robber Jesse James.
Pikey remained, as of 1989, common prison slang for Romani people or those who have a (perceived) similar lifestyle of itinerant unemployment and travel.[12]
More recently, pikey was applied to Irish Travellers (also known as tinkers and knackers) and non-Roma Gypsies.[13][14] In the late 20th century, it came to be used to describe "a lower-class person, regarded as coarse or disreputable."[7][15]
Pikey's most common contemporary use is not as a term for the Gypsy ethnic group, but as a catch-all phrase to refer to people, of any ethnic group, who travel around with no fixed abode.
Among English Romani Gypsies the term pikey refers to a Traveller that is not Romani. It may also refer to a member who has been cast out of the family. If a member of the family is hot headed or a thief or a trouble maker or brings misfortune on the family, then a family council will be held and that member will be cast out of the family and will have to stay out of the way for ever more. They are regarded as never having even been a part of the family.[16]
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the definition became even looser and is sometimes used to refer to a wide section of the (generally urban) underclass of the country (in England generally known as chavs), or merely a person of any social class who "lives on the cheap" such as a bohemian.
Negative English attitudes towards "pikeys" were a running theme in the 2000 Guy Ritchie film Snatch. In 2003 the Firle Bonfire Society burned an effigy of a family of gypsies inside a caravan after travelers damaged local land.[17] The number plate on the caravan read P1KEY. A storm of protests and accusations of racism rapidly followed.[18][19][20][21] Twelve members of the society were arrested but the Crown Prosecution Service decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed on a charge of 'incitement to racial hatred'.[22]
The Oxford History of English notes that:
"young people who use charver or pikey to identify a contemporary style of dress or general demeanour suggest an aimless "street" lifestyle, unaware of the Romany origin of the first or of connotation with "gypsy" of the second. Pikey, formed from turnpike roads, as along with pikee and piker been used in the South East [of England] especially since the mid-Nineteenth-Century to refer to itinerant people of all kinds and been used by travelling people to refer to those of low caste. Scally a corresponding label originating in the North West of England was taken up by the media and several websites, only to be superseded by chav. A very recent survey has unearthed 127 synonyms, with ned favoured in Scotland, charver in North East England and pikey across the South [of England].[23]
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