Mind your language | 13 March 2004

Before I forget, here is a slight development on chav, this year’s youth pejorative term of choice. It is, as Sampson’s Dictionary of the Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales makes clear, a Romany word, though it need not signify a Gypsy. Anyway, that popular jazz man Ron Rubin writes to suggest that the Spanish word chaval, meaning not ‘a pikey’ but ‘a bloke’, comes from the same source.