Poverty

Although the condition of poverty is now generally regarded with sympathy, this has not always been the case, as is partly seen in the entry for beggar. In John Skelton’s satire “Why come ye not to Court?” (1522), the figure of Cardinal Wolsey actually mocks rascals “not worth two plums” and “rain-beaten beggars” (601-2). Yet in Shakespeare the poor are always treated with dignity: King Lear’s moment of illumination and empathy occurs in the storm scene: “Poor naked wretches … / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm” (III iv 28-29). The same attitude informs literature up to recent times. In the semantics of the word-field there is a similar division: the compound poverty-stricken shows sympathy, but the adjective poor has developed senses of scorn and belittlement similar to little and old in many phrases and idioms unrelated to poverty per se . These include “the poor fool” and “in poor health.” In other contexts the term is definitely critical, as in “a poor showing” and “a poor excuse,” as opposed to the more literal usages “poor as a church mouse” and “poor relation.”

Dr. Johnson (1755) listed the following range of such meanings for poor: “paltry, mean, contemptible”; “unimportant”; “unhappy, uneasy”; “mean, depressed, low, rejected”; “wretched.” As can be inferred, a fair number of these senses reflect notions of class that have continued and even been accentuated in supposedly egalitarian but actually capitalist societies such as modern Britain and the United States. Although Shakespeare was the first to use trash of a person in 1604 (in Othello V i 85), the sense has developed in invidious demographic phrases like “poor white trash” and “trailer trash” (from about 1943). Poor white trash has a long history and a surprising origin as a term of disparagement for Southern whites by black slaves before the Civil War. In her Journal entry for June 1, 1833, the visiting English actress Fanny Kemble noted: “The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash.’”

Other terms from the same provenance are buckra, peckerwood , and redneck . Of these, buckra is the most interesting, deriving from an African language, probably Ibo or Efik in Nigeria, in which mbakara means “he who surrounds or governs.” Clearly imported by African slaves, buckra was originally a term of respect both in Caribbean English and in the southern United States, where it was used by slaves to refer to and address their masters. It then was generalized to mean “a white man,” losing status in American English (especially after the abolition of slavery by acquiring the association of poverty) but retaining it in the Caribbean.

A similar semantic relationship exists historically between the different senses of wretched and miserable. Wretched derives from Anglo-Saxon wræcca , meaning an “exile,” and has continued to combine the senses of “poverty” and “unhappiness,” just as miserable , from Latin miser , “poor,” combines the original sense with that of “unhappy,” as in the religious phrase “miserable sinner” (ca. 1536) and “idle beggars and miserable persons,” used in the minutes of the Privy Council of Scotland in 1585. Both can be used unsympathetically, as in “that wretched builder has let us down again” or “yet another miserable performance from the Minister.”