AceAceBaby wrote:
I'm not going to talk about "chavs", but if someone can come up with a label for aggressive thugs who swear and beat up people who look different (instead of just sniggering at them on the internet), while almost all wearing tracksuits and hoodies, then that would be great. Then I can say those people are scum, without offending people who wear trainers and leisurewear otherwise.
Somewhere along the line "chav" seems to have been expanded to cover a lot of typically working class people- a lot of my family would probably look "chavvy." But they're not "rat faced proles". I would guess that, semantics aside, everyone "knows" what people mean when they talk about chavscum, and a lot of this debate is just picking at definitions for the sake of looking liberal.
This. I've always used chav to mean "mindless, ignorant, aggressive cunt". It annoys me when, for instance, a girl I know is described as a chav simply because she has cacky taste and is loud and a bit dim (she's young, apart from anything else, so will probably grow out of a lot of it), because though she may be annoying, she's a pretty sweet person at heart and if given a chance is smarter than people think. One of my old neighbours, too, dressed and talked and boozed in a manner that would terrify middle-class parents everywhere, but he's not a bad kid, just thick and too weak-willed to question the herd. Some of his mates are gleefully violent pricks, however, and I wouldn't argue if someone called them chavs.
It's come to be used as "ugh, look at their clothes and hear the way they speak. These people are clearly chavs and must be sterilised", though. This is annoying, and I just don't bother using it anymore to avoid the confusion - I much prefer "slack-jawed aggro fuckwit".
I really don't like baseball caps, though. Burberry or not, they just look crappy and pointless.
Also, opinions can be wrong. Anything less is just cultural relativism and utter bollocks - of
course an opinion can be wrong, otherwise everything is as true as everything else, which is just patently ridiculous on anything but an abstract meta-wank level.