Did you know many insults in the English language originally came from words for common and poor people? The reason for this was that the rich and powerful were very important in shaping the language and they had a natural dislike of those who were poorer and lower class.
Here are six such words:
Pleb (adj. Plebian) – In the Roman republic, the plebs made up the average citizenry of the state as opposed to the patricians who could tie their ancestry to the founders of Rome and who dominated the senate and the consulship. Over the course of many years of struggle, the plebs eventually won the rights that the Patricians had guarded, but the stigma of being a pleb never faded and was later cemented in the English language.
Vulgar – This word comes directly from Latin vulgaris meaning ‘common’ or ‘relating to the people’. Vulgate Latin was the language spoken by the everyday Roman as opposed to literary Latin. The Vulgate bible, the ‘commonly used bible’, was a Latin translation of the bible in 4th century AD and forms the basis of the bible still used by the Catholic church today.
Churl (adj. churlish) – Deriving from the old English ceorl, meaning ‘peasant’. Further back than this, the Proto-Indo European root of this word simply meant ‘man’ and in some languages (Lithuanian, Polish, etc.) it forms the root of their terms for King – a strange coincidence where the same root can come to mean completely opposite terms in different languages.
Villain (adj. villainous) – This is the French opposite number to ‘churl’ deriving from old French vilain meaning ‘peasant’. In latin villa was the term for ‘country house’ and so a vilain was a person tied to a manor house and its surrounding fields.
Boor (adj. boorish) – Another term for peasant this time deriving from the latin bovis meaning ‘cow’ or ‘ox’, and then the old French bovier ‘herdsman’.
Knave (adj. knavish) – From the old English cnafa ‘boy’ or ‘male servant’. A servant, like a peasant, was another low class occupation and received the same treatment as churl, villain and boor.