Faster than you can say Vicky Pollard, the slang word Chav has gripped the vocabulary of press hounds as much as it has in the most talked about house in Britain, the Big Brother house.
Type in the word Chav in Google and don't be surprised when you come up with 2.8m UK pages dedicated to all things Chavvy. Yes, and it apparently means "lower class; uneducated and ignorant people".
So isn't the constant and frequent use of the word in the newspapers just a little bit wrong and completely derogatory? I mean could you imagine a fashion page entitled: "How to achieve the lower class and uneducated look? I don't fink so!
So what does it take to be a bonafide Chav? Do you have a fondness for all things Burberry like Daniella Westbrook? Would you consider naming your first born 'Chardonnay'? Do you watch the most iconic Chav character, Vicky Pollard, and think “she’s taking all my words?”
But the press seems to label people who are young and not posh as 100% Chav. It’s pure snobbish commentary and comes as recent research revealed that nearly half of Britain’s top journalists were educated in Oxford or Cambridge. So, what does this say? That most of Britain’s journalists are upper class Oxbridge graduates who are being derogatory to working class people?
A 2005 survey found that in December 2004 alone 114 British newspaper articles used the word, clearly showing that Christmas is the season to be Chavvy. We're told by the media that the Queen of "Chav" is Coleen McCoughlin, fiancée of footie wonder Wayne Rooney. Is this the same Coleen that has an agony aunt column in a national paper?
And is it the same tabloid paper that regularly slates Chavs? How hypocritical with Coleen as their number one chav-meister? It seems a little silly that the same national paper that regularly slates this female for being a Chav would allow her to grace their advice pages.
It seems these Oxbridge graduates are as hypocritical as they rude.
About this article
This article was written by Annabel McLeod. It was published on the Reach for the Sky website.
