chav

A male British person of (generally) low socio-economic status with a characteristic clothing style, dialect, and mode of consumer activity. A chav is generally cunning and resourceful and invokes fear amongst his more passive and uncreative contemporaries. The character the "artful dodger" from Dickens' "Oliver Twist" represents the archetypal chav: poor and lacking in ambition, but clever, witty, and fond of creative-poetic language. The authentic "cockney", long since vanished from London, might also be considered a type of proto-chav. The term "chav" is almost exclusively used in a derogatory sense by out-group persons, most commonly lower or middle-class British persons actively seeking to establish a more prestigious socio-economic status and the corresponding identity. The term - and the emotional and negative connotations associated therewith - (see the vast majority of the other definitions above) can be considered the latest manifestation of the typically rigid British conception of class-consciousness.